A man in his 50s in Ongjin County was recently given six months of forced labor after he was arrested on charges of stealing fertilizer, Daily NK has learned.
Speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons, a reporting partner in South Hwanghae Province told Daily NK on Thursday that the man — a farm worker identified by his family name of Pak — was arrested in mid-May for stealing his work team’s fertilizer.
The head of the work team caught Pak stealing fertilizer from the team’s fertilizer management room in February, too, but gave him a pass, warning him never to do it again.
However, Pak was caught stealing fertilizer again and turned over to the county police.
“Prior to COVID-19, we usually used fertilizer imported from China because local fertilizer factories weren’t operating normally, and after COVID-19, even imports of Chinese-made fertilizer dried up, so fertilizer is worth its price in gold,” the reporting partner said.
With domestically made fertilizer difficult to find and expensive at that, some people steal fertilizer given to collective farms by the state during the farming season to use in their own private plots, the reporting partner explained.
“Since COVID, harvests fell due to a lot of factors such as supply shortages and natural disasters, so we’ve been unable to fill ourselves up all year round, not even with corn,” he said. “In these circumstances, if farmers can’t maintain their own private plots, they end up simply suffering, so they are focusing on their private plots, even if that means stealing fertilizer.”
In fact, Pak confessed during questioning that “he needed to fertilize his private plot, but had no money, so he had no choice but to steal it from the work team,” the reporting partner said.
The reporting partner also reported that other farms are suffering from similar circumstances.
The government provides farms with a certain amount of fertilizer, but given how woefully insufficient it is for farming, the farms have to provide the rest on their own. However, farmers are frequently making off with the fertilizer, putting farms in an even tougher bind.
“It’s astounding that [the state] is calling on farms to resolve food shortages themselves, raising yields per jeongbo [a Korean unit of measurement equal to approximately 9,900 square meters], while failing to resolve even a single issue related to fertilizer. To raise yields, I think it would be more effective to resolve the fundamental problems faced by farmers first,” the reporting partner said.
“Nowadays, many people say that with everyone mired in poverty, the time is coming when people won’t steal, but pluck out their eyes, too.”
Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler.
Daily NK works with a network of reporting partners who live inside North Korea and China. Their identities remain anonymous due to security concerns. More information about Daily NK’s reporting partner network and information gathering activities can be found on our FAQ page here.
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