North Korean authorities recently handed down an “administrative order” in Yanggang Province to prevent some farms in the province from taking advantage of skyrocketing rice prices to sell off rice they secretly stored up from last fall’s harvest.
“Rice prices have recently jumped and farms are using the opportunity to brazenly sell off rice they secretly stored up last year at the highest possible prices at local markets,” a source in Yanggang Province told Daily NK earlier today. “In response, the government issued an administrative order on June 16 to prevent such behavior.”
Daily NK’s monitoring of commodity prices at markets has found that the price of one kilogram of rice in Yanggang Province, which had stayed in the KPW 4,000 to KPW 5,000 range previously, skyrocketed to KPW 6,300 as of June 16, and jumped up to KPW 7,000 as of June 27.
According to the source, the administrative order specifically called the selling of secretly stored up rice “thievery” that must be “thoroughly controlled,” and that farms involved in the practice are not doing their national duty to protect rice stores.
The order also pointed out that farm managers secretly sitting on stores of rice are “wrong-headed” and even “traitorous,” particularly given that natural disasters last year made it difficult for farms to harvest enough rice to fill up military rice stores.
The order further made clear that storing up rice secretly was an “act of deceiving the party,” and that giving out bribes with the illicitly-obtained rice to provincial, municipal, and county-level cadres who come to the farms for inspections, or treating them to meals, are “anti-socialist” acts.
The order also stated that “cadres are the core of the problem” given that all this “anti-socialist behavior” is occurring under the direct orders of farm cadres, especially at a time when North Korean leader Kim Jong Un recently expressed deep concern about the “weakening of the class stronghold” in agricultural areas.
The order emphasized that the authorities will actively “crackdown” on people who sell off secretly stored rice while simultaneously failing to meet state-set production quotas.
“Farm cadres who have read the administrative order complain that while they face dismissal or even criminal charges if they are caught, they have little choice but to [store up and sell off the rice],” the source said.
They point out that their farms lack seeds for planting, and they still have to acquire all the materials required for farming – such as farming equipment, manure, vinyl sheets, and fertilizer – by themselves. If they fail to store up rice to sell later, they argue, their farms will face difficulties in acquiring these things the next year.
Farm cadres complain that their farms are unable to distribute crop yields among the farmers because the government takes “all of the farm yields in the fall,” which means they are all just doing farming “for the benefit of the state.” Many are quietly criticizing the government for “wielding its baton” while “going on about the national situation” without any “concern for what is happening on the ground.”
