North Korea’s central authorities ordered South and North Hwanghae provinces, the country’s leading rice-growing region, on June 9, 2026, to compile detailed rice-transplanting reports reviewing this year’s planting campaign, leaving provincial agricultural officials gripped by fear of severe punishment over inaccurate figures, according to a source inside the country.
A source in South Hwanghae province told Daily NK on Tuesday that the directive, issued June 9, calls for South and North Hwanghae provinces to aggressively push the rice-transplanting review and submit detailed reports, with a plenary session of the Workers’ Party Central Committee, the periodic meeting where the party’s top decision-making body sets policy direction, set to convene in late June.
The source said the directive is largely meant to maximize pressure on lower-level officials to produce results. Central authorities specifically demanded an evaluation of how efficiently rural support work was carried out during the planting season, along with clear evidence on whether each farm met its quotas and, if not, why.
Central authorities also strongly demanded that officials submit, within just a few days, detailed reports recording the labor, materials and farm machinery operating rates used in rice transplanting. Officials are said to have shown extreme fear at an accompanying warning that anyone caught filing a false report would face severe punishment.
“The targets Pyongyang is demanding are fundamentally out of touch with reality,” the source said. “If the figures in the report are off even slightly, fear is taking over on the ground that punishment could run all the way from officials at the provincial Rural Economy Committee down to the lowest-ranking farm work team leaders.”
The source said that fear deepened after provincial party committee instructors, who personally delivered the directive to the field, warned that “this June plenary session is a fateful meeting that the marshal” (a reference to Kim Jong Un, president of the State Affairs Commission) “will personally preside over,” adding, “If problems such as false reporting occur in our province, we will have to answer with our lives.”
Fear over the rice-transplanting report reaches the farms
In response, officials from the provincial Rural Economy Committee are reported to have gone directly to the fields for ground-level inspections, checking the density of transplanted rice seedlings down to the number of clusters per square meter.
Amid this, farm officials have reportedly complained that “the higher-ups tell us to push hard on the rice-transplanting review, but how are we supposed to put together an impressive report when there isn’t enough fertilizer or fuel? It’s suffocating, and in the end we’re the ones getting squeezed to meet Pyongyang’s expectations.”
Farm workers, meanwhile, are said to be sighing that “the way Hwanghae’s farms are being squeezed this hard makes it look like Pyongyang is getting ready to take the entire harvest this fall,” adding, “We’re already worried about how we’ll get through the winter.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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