N.Korea, facing crisis, sends city people to farm
Tue 31 May 2005
By John Ruwitch and Lindsay Beck
BEIJING, May 31 (Reuters) - Grappling with severe shortages of food and fuel, North Korea is sending millions of city dwellers into the countryside to work on farms as it girds for the worst, aid workers and other sources say.
The Communist government has told its people to prepare for conditions as harsh as those of the mid-1990s, when famine is believed to have killed more than one million people, said a businessman in China who travels to North Korea frequently.
Richard Ragan, director of the U.N. World Food Programme's operations in North Korea, said: "There has been a national mobilisation and people from all walks and stripes of life have been asked to go help farmers transplant rice, even people in non-agricultural jobs."
"Even ministry of foreign affairs officials who work with the U.N. WFP have been asked to go help farmers on the weekends."
Mass mobilisation for public works projects is common in the tightly controlled state, and aid workers and frequent visitors say helping farmers has become an annual event.
"For the people here, everything is done en masse," one aid worker said by telephone from Pyongyang.
"It's nothing different this year than other years, I don't think. They are limited by the amount of agricultural land they've got ... You don't need more and more people every year because the land area is finite."
But the businessman who travels to North Korea regularly said this appeared to be the biggest mobilisation of its kind in years and added that it was mostly due to a fuel shortage forcing the agriculture sector to become less mechanised.
He said North Koreans had told him they were "preparing for the worst, for another Arduous March". North Koreans call the famine period of the 1990s the Arduous March.
"Basically, Pyongyang is fairly empty at the moment. Most people have been taken out of their jobs," he said, adding that those left were working double shifts.
About 60 percent of North Korea's 22.5 million people live in urban areas.
MISGUIDED POLICIES
Misguided North Korean economic policies, the collapse of its Communist benefactors in Eastern Europe and successive natural disasters in the 1990s led to widespread famine. The food situation has remained dire.
The World Food Programme, the biggest aid agency in North Korea, said there was a food crisis in the country and that its stocks were drying up because it had not received a major pledge of aid since late last year.
But WFP has said this was not related to the North's refusal to participate in six-party talks on its nuclear programmes.
The WFP said it couldn't quite explain the rationale for the mass mobilisation, given the finite amount of land available for cultivation in North Korea.
But it speculated that since the regime has made increasing food production a national priority, it was part of efforts to try to boost food supplies.
"It may not just be a question of providing additional labour, it could be beyond that," said Gerald Bourke of the WFP.
South Korea's central bank said on Tuesday that the North's economy grew for a sixth consecutive year in 2004 by 2.2 percent from 1.8 percent the year before.
But the numbers masked North Korea's systemic poverty and a continued inability to feed its people on its own.
The businessman pointed out that rice planting aside, many other parts of the agricultural process would sometimes be mechanised, for example building dykes and irrigating paddies -- work that relies on manual labour in the absence of fuel for machinery.
Either way, every little bit of help was seen as crucial.
The North Korean public distribution system, which was the main source of food for the country's city dwellers, is only able to give an average 250 gms, or roughly one cup, of rice, maize and sometimes potatoes to each person, the WFP said.
Kathi Zellweger of the aid agency Caritas said North Korea, known officially as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was heading for a difficult time.
"This year's agricultural season is very likely not going to be very successful because of the climate. There is a very short planting season in the DPRK and I'm told we are behind by about two to three weeks, and that will have an impact on this year's harvest," she said.
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