It is becoming apparent that this year’s growing season will be afflicted by an even more serious lack of fertilizer than normal. Sources predict that farming on collective farms will be negatively affected, and that privately farmed areas will be hit hard.
A source from North Hamkyung Province reported on Sunday in a telephone interview with the Daily NK, “Since early April, demand for fertilizer has been increasing, but now you cannot see any fertilizer even in the jangmadang. In March, due to soaring rice prices, fertilizer prices rose, and one kilogram of fertilizer cost the equivalent of three to five kilograms of corn. However, presently, you cannot buy it even at these high prices.”
He added, “Until now, no fertilizer from the government has arrived on collective farms. On some collective farms, cadres are pushing farmers to collect human excrement for fertilizer.”
Residents of rural areas which face the corn planting season are worried about their private farms on steep, mountainous fields, and some are saying they may not even bother trying this year, according to the source.
In North Korea, there are three basic channels of fertilizer supply, and all three are currently inactive or much reduced.
The first channel is from domestic fertilizer factories. Cadres in charge of the distribution of fertilizer from these factories also siphon some off and sell it in the markets.
Whenever fertilizer factories need money for facilities maintenance or purchases, factory managers sell fertilizer to wholesalers, since the authorities are not able to offer them any funding. Additionally, officials from the “Farming Materials Station” skim off hundreds of kilograms of fertilizer when they supply collective farms with their allocations by fabricating the documentation. The amounts they skim largely depend on factory size and the cadre’s degree of cunning. This fertilizer usually ends up in the market.
The second method of obtaining fertilizer is from cadres in charge of fertilizer management from the Chosun Red Cross Society, Ministry of Agriculture or ports as and when foreign aid fertilizer arrives there. During the distribution process, fertilizer is siphoned off in various ways, and this also ends up in the markets.
The last channel is from managers and cadres on collective farms. When allocations are delivered to farms, the managers of work units or farm cadres often turn around and use some of it to raise capital for the management of the farm, such as for purchasing agricultural machinery or necessary fuel.
Despite the existence of these three channels, there has been no fertilizer in the markets since early April.
The source said that this is not just an agricultural concern. “The fertilizer problem is a significant issue closely related to food prices,” he explained, “so people have been growing more anxious about possible food price rises.”
In the past, North Korea received 300,000 to 350,000 tons of fertilizer every year from South Korea, but since Lee Myung Bak came to power, the Six-Party Talks came to a standstill and North Korea carried out long-range missile tests and the second nuclear test, South Korean fertilizer aid has been suspended.
According to a report released by Kwon Tae Jin, a researcher with the Korea Rural Economic Institute, North Korea did import 17,000 tons of fertilizer from China in January this year, but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the North’s annual requirement of approximately 500,000 tons.
