In another sign of the parlous state of the North Korean agricultural sector, local farming administrators in Yangkang Province and elsewhere have told farm workers to personally provide the chemical fertilizer for use on the fields this spring.
A source from Yangkang Province informed Daily NK today, “The authorities have told farm workers to present 5kg of chemical fertilizer per person for the current farming season. Officials from the local farm management committee are telling them to give money if they don’t have the goods. For a family where both adults are farm workers that means 10kg.”
“If it were compost from human waste that they wanted then farmers could make it,” the source added, “but fertilizer cannot be made like that, Theft, pure and simple.”
Confirming the story, a second source from North Pyongan Province added, “This is the first time I have heard of farmers being told to provide fertilizer.”
If 10kg of chemical fertilizer were purchased on the open market at current prices, it would cost approximately 15,000 North Korean Won in total (decent rice is worth approximately the same amount).
The North Korean chemical fertilizer industry has been in a disastrous state since the mid 1990s, meaning that a large percentage of farm needs have been met by Chinese fertilizer or, where possible, international aid. Farm managers have tended to do the best they can with a mixture of biological fertilizer and, after approximately 2005, by obtaining loans from local moneylenders for repayment in kind following the autumn harvest.
However, with increasing levels of state appropriation for ‘patriotic purposes’ (notably the Chosun People’s Army) it has grown increasingly difficult for farms to repay their debts in this way, and sources say that non-payment has become a problem, something which, alongside harsh restrictions imposed on moneylenders in recent months, may have triggered the last resort approach of demanding that farmers provide it themselves.
