South Pyongan Province, a part of North Korea’s breadbasket, has recently been mobilizing students in efforts to get more people excited about participating in farmwork, Daily NK has learned.
“At the beginning of this month, the party committee in South Pyongan Province described the food supply as a critical issue that demands total dedication,” a source in the province told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The committee ordered students to be mobilized for early morning propaganda sessions, explaining that propaganda and agitation are the best way to focus on farming before spring comes.”
Residents of South Pyongan Province are already delivering manure to farms throughout the province nearly every day as part of a broader national manure collection campaign. But now provincial authorities are sending out vehicles equipped with loudspeakers to emphasize how important farms are to the Workers’ Party’s agricultural policies and to encourage the public to do more to help farmers.
“The provincial party committee says that every able-bodied person needs to come out to help the farmers. Unlike other provinces, South Pyongyan Province has set its own ‘winter farm mobilization campaign period’ and has underlined that all the farm work that can be done before the spring planting should be done early,” the source said.
The provincial party committee has already been mobilizing students in elementary school, middle school and high school to transport manure. But now, given the lack of staff to engage in propaganda and agitation activities, the committee has instructed students from middle school, high school, and university be put to work in promoting the party’s agricultural policies.
In short, the committee is telling students to continue to work diligently to complete their own manure production quotas while also striving to promote the party’s agricultural policy and raise other people’s spirits.
“The provincial party committee is focusing on propaganda and agitation programs in order to improve the morale of farm workers and motivate people to be more proactive about helping out on the farms,” the source said. “On the committee’s orders, students are carrying heaps of manure to the farms at 5 AM while greeting everyone, banging drums and gongs, shouting slogans and waving flags.”
Faced with government pressure to get more involved in raising other people’s spirits, students are grumbling that they feel more like farmers than students nowadays.
“As if the manure campaign in the winter, the rice planting campaign in the spring, the weeding campaign in the summer and the harvest campaign in the fall weren’t enough, now we’re supposed to go out before dawn in this cold weather to bang gongs and drums and promote agriculture policy,” students are complaining, according to the source.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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