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Last
March, I had an opportunity to visit North Korea for agricultural
research, invited by a Switzerland-based NGO. In North Korea, country so
close yet so far away, food shortage has been aggravating of late but as to
the cause of the problem, no substantive information has yet surfaced.
Here I report an overview of the situation now that I have visited the country and come to grasp
it. North Korean economy has
gone into a severe recession, prompted by changes in the social
environment, notably the collapse of the socialist regime of the Soviet
Union and East European countries, both closely tied with North Korea
once, and the reduction in barter trades after China's economic policy
reform. Burdened with large trade
deficits, its currency reserves have been dwindling. This has made it
hard to secure raw materials, including crude oil, necessary for advancing
the Four-Modernization Policy (irrigation,
electrification, mechanization, and chemical industrialization) based on
the Juche idea of independence, as advocated in
the agricultural sector in the past. As a result, maintaining high levels of crop
production has become difficult. Of all, the most important factor
in the declining crop
productivity is believed to be reduction in the supply of fertilizers from domestic
chemical fertilizer factories, whose productive capacity has been
seriously hampered. As most
of North Korea's soil is high in mineral content so its fertility very
low, fertilization is essential in crop production. According
to interviews with local farmers, the amount of fertilizers used has dropped to one-third of what it used to be
in the past 10 years and rice
harvest has fallen by 50 percent.
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It is easily conceivable that the environment for crop
production has deteriorated due to other, economic recession-induced
factors as well;
for example, energy shortage leading to problems with operating irrigation
pumps and to incapacitation of farm machinery operations. As for
non-paddy farming, the soil has become poor and the harvest has
decreased because of the prolonged planting of corn as a single crop
over a long period of time. To maintain the harvest, more
fertilizers are needed. In addition, the natural disasters,
including flood, cold weather, local downpour, high tide, drought, and hail,
that have occurred 5 years in a row, have further contributed to reducing crop
production, making the food demand-supply condition even worse.
At present, the North Korean government is trying to
implement measures to increase food production; diversifying crops
and producing new crop strains, introducing green-manure plants, promoting
double-cropping, etc. However, it will probably take some time for
these attempts to bear fruit. In any of these measures,
soil-fertilization is essential and rebuilding economy is prerequisite for
securing fertilizers. Unfortunately, it looks as if the food
situation in North Korea will not improve for a while, and they will have
to depend on assistance from the outside, from international organizations
and others.
[Trans.: TS]
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