North Korea recently instructed agricultural officials to focus on wheat farming as part of nationwide efforts to change the country’s “grain production structure.”
In fact, the authorities are reportedly creating an atmosphere that condemns people expressing negative opinions about wheat farming as “factional elements.”
According to a Daily NK source in North Korea last Thursday, the country’s authorities issued the instructions to provincial agricultural village financial committees and city agricultural village management committees in early December, and even held video conferences pertaining to the order.
In the instructions, the authorities acknowledged the negative results of this year’s wheat farming; namely, that it did not achieve its planned goals.
However, the instructions pointed out that if farming officials and farmers assume all of their responsibility and adopt scientific farming methods, “difficulties can be overcome to some degree.”
The authorities accused critics who call wheat farming inappropriate for North Korea or a “premature agricultural policy” of being “modern-day factional elements.”
They warned that they will punish people who speak out against expanding wheat farming as “anti-party and anti-revolutionary elements.”
LOOKING BACK TO HISTORY FOR INSPIRATION
The section of the instructions that mentioned “factional elements” introduced the anecdote of how late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung emphasized steel production during the post-war reconstruction period.
After the Korean War, while performing on-the-spot guidance at a steel plant, Kim said if North Korea could produce just 10,000 tons more of steel, the country would be able to be proud of itself.
According to the anecdote, “factional elements” criticized Kim’s comments, saying it would be quicker and cheaper to simply import the steel rather than produce it.
However, North Korea produced 120,000 more tons of steel that year.
Using this anecdote, the instructions claimed that the very idea thought that wheat farming did not suit the country represented “incompetent, irresponsible thinking.”
In November, in fact, North Korean authorities held a month-long review of their policy to expand wheat farming this year.
During the review, officials reportedly said that while some regions achieved their goal of expanding acreage for wheat farming, “only one or two units [collective farms] nationwide actually produced their quotas of wheat.”
The review also reflected the negative sentiment among farmers that farms could not produce much wheat even if they used several kinds of fertilizer, making it a money-losing proposition.
The Cabinet’s Agricultural Commission put all this into a report, but the Workers’ Party leadership ignored it and issued the instructions calling on agricultural officials to “unconditionally” move forward with party policy, the source claimed.
In a policy speech before the Supreme People’s Assembly on Sept. 29 of last year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for increasing nationwide acreage for paddy and upfield rice and doubling the acreage for wheat and barley. He called for conditions that would enable “civilized improvements” to the food situation by boosting harvests and providing the people with white rice and wheat flour.
At the fourth plenary meeting of the Eighth Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee at the end of last year, Kim also said the changing of North Korea’s grain production structure and the heavy promotion of rice and wheat farming are major party tasks.
EXPANDING WHEAT CULTIVATION GOOD IN THE LONG-RUN
Daily NK understands through its source network in the country that, with wheat farming failing to produce planned results, North Korea recently imported wheat from Russia and provided it to military-related agencies and state-run food shops.
Cho Chung-hee, director of Good Farmers and an expert on North Korean agriculture, told Daily NK in a telephone interview that wheat consumes less soil fertility than corn, and that “in the long term, expanding wheat cultivation instead of corn will likely help improve North Korea’s food situation.”
However, he said the most important thing to expand wheat production is “the adoption of breeds that fit North Korea’s environment,” adding, “North Korean authorities are emphasizing scientific farming methods, but without investment into adopting superior breeds, expanding wheat harvest will prove difficult.”
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