North Korea’s acute shortage in power supply this year, caused by droughts cutting hydropower plants short of their output, has not only spoiled the harvest, but also interrupted rice threshing, a process that separates edible grains from stalks. This has forced people to find their own ways of powering the machines required to complete the operation, the Daily NK has learned.

“Because of the rice harvesting season, collective farms are receiving power first, but the voltage is so low that it can’t power the motors properly. This has caused trouble for rice threshing operations,” a source in North Hamkyung Province told the Daily NK on November 11th.

“The motor for the threshing machine is 220V, but the power supplied is only 120-130V, so a lot of times the coils in the machines end up burning,” the source elaborated. “It takes about one week to get that fixed, so people have to sit by their rice without being able to thresh it at the right time and some of it rots away.”

Many collective farms have been buying their own diesel-powered 10-12 HP engines from China to thresh the rice, he explained. Smaller 8-12 HP diesel engine models were mainly imported from China in the early 1990s and are employed as engines for small fishing boats.

“Engines from China were mostly used to power squid fishing boats or small vessels, but as the power supply has dwindled recently, they’ve been used a lot for threshing machines, pushing up prices,” the source said. “In September, they sold for roughly 500,000-700,000 KPW [60-83 USD], but now they fetch about 1-1.5 million KPW [119-179 USD], double the original price. Despite that, demand is so high they don’t have enough to sell.”

In the market, 1 kg of rice costs roughly 4,500 KPW [0.54 USD], meaning the money for an engine would buy roughly 200-300 kg of rice--enough for a working class five-member family to live on for a year.

The source explained that along with growing demand for fuel-powered compact engines from China, the price of diesel is also on the rise. 1 kg of diesel costs approximately 15,000 KPW [1.79 USD], a rise of 5,000 KPW [0.60 USD], bringing it to almost the same price as gasoline.

Facing these circumstances, some people on collective farms have been threshing rice in the middle of the night, when power usage tends to be lower, in order to accumulate enough to sell in the markets and buy their own Chinese engine and diesel. “State electricity is pretty much useless,” is the sentiment among most farmers, according to the source.

Meanwhile, North Korea’s Party-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, published an editorial piece on the 7th headlined, “Let the Entire Country Rise in the Battle to Secure Water,” where it said, “There has not been a year in the past century when there has been such little rainfall.” 

The repercussions were made abundantly clear, “As a result, the output from our hydropower plants has dropped and many reservoirs for farming have dried up or carry less water, meaning we face a severe shortage in water for next year’s farming.”