North Korea is set to operate a farm in Amur Oblast, an area of the Russian Far East, according to a report carried today by the Japanese daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun.
According to the piece, the North Korean authorities have established a joint entity with a state-run company from the region and secured 1,000ha of land. North Korea will supply labor to the farm starting this spring, whereupon the farm workers will begin to use local Amur Oblast raw materials to produce foodstuffs for transfer back to North Korea.
Amur Oblast is three times the size of North Korea, but according to the 2010 Russian census its population is less than a million, approximately 4% of the North Korean total.
The news comes after it was reported in September 2011 that a delegation from the North Korean Ministry of Agriculture had visited Amur Oblast and concluded an agreement to lease a substantially larger area, 200,000ha, of fallow land in the area.
