N. Korea Mobilizes Millions on Farms Amid Talk of Food Crisis

From the first light of morning, soldiers squat in the fields, many of them stripped down to their T-shirts. They are joined by women with babies strapped to their backs, children who look like they ought to be in school and senior citizens with white kerchiefs wrapped around their heads to protect them from the sun.

It is the height of the planting season in North Korea and the regime has mobilized millions of people to make the most of the moment. Even office workers from the city are spending their weekends in the countryside planting rice and other crops.

The mass mobilization has been the custom every year in North Korea for decades -- it is usually as much a way of inculcating collectivist values as getting out the crops.

But this year, it is larger than in the past and has taken on particular urgency as fears grow that North Korea could be facing a famine as bad as the one that killed about 2 million people in the mid-1990s.

Last year’s harvest did not live up to expectations and this year’s is supposed be especially meager because of an abnormally cool spring and delays in humanitarian shipments of fertilizer from South Korea.

“You can see that people will be going hungry,” said Kang Jong Man, a South Korean agriculture and fisheries official who was visiting the pocket of North Korea just south of Mt. Kumgang that is open to tourists.

Aside from the poor weather, North Korea’s food problems appear to have increased as a result of the unfavorable political climate. The regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has not ingratiated it with the international community, and humanitarian aid has dropped steeply.

Even with Washington’s announcement Wednesday that the U.S. would donate 50,000 tons of food this year, the United Nations World Food Program says it might have to cut off 80% of its 6.5 million aid recipients in North Korea.

South Korea, angry about the North’s withdrawal from six-nation talks on the nuclear issue, held off on sending fertilizer until May.

Although this flat, temperate region near the demilitarized zone is better suited for farming than the country’s more mountainous regions, the crop is patently dismal to the experienced eye.

As Kang looks out from a bus at what is supposed to be the country’s best farmland, he shakes his head with disapproval and enumerates the shortcomings.

The rice paddies are thin and uneven. Potato plants are pale and stunted. The fields are not properly graded. Barley still on the stalks should have been harvested weeks ago so that the same fields could be used for rice.

There are hardly any tractors in sight, only oxen -- and even they appear too small and weak to properly till the land.

“You need capital and a budget to have a decent field. You need to maintain your soil. The North Koreans clearly haven’t done any of that. The crop will not be worth all the manpower they’re putting into it,” Kang said.

Under the best of circumstances, this is a traditionally lean month in North Korea because by now the previous year’s harvest of staples -- rice and corn -- has been used up and the new crop won’t start coming in until August.

But this year, food seems to be in especially short supply, said people working and living inside the country.

“The North Koreans don’t like to say anything is wrong.... But I get the sense that they are having big problems with food this year and it is getting worse,” said Yang Yung Min, a South Korean executive who has lived for nearly two years near Mt. Kumgang working with Hyundai Asan Corp., the firm that runs the tours to the region.

In the typically secretive style of the North Korean government, nothing has been said publicly about a food shortage. But the World Food Program office in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, recently conducted a series of focus groups with families, who complained about sharply rising food prices. Economic restructuring implemented in 2002 compels families to purchase much of their food on the open market, but prices for rice and corn have tripled in the last year, said Richard Ragan, the WFP director for North Korea.

“What people are saying to us is that food production last year might not have been as high as everybody thought,” Ragan said in a telephone interview from Pyongyang.

“We are observing as well that there seems to be a lot less livestock around and less cereal to feed the livestock,” he said.

People working elsewhere in North Korea had the same assessment.

“My sense is that this is going be a very, very bad year. The spring was cold and planting was delayed. They really don’t have enough fertilizer,” said Pilju Kim Joo, a Minnesota-based seed agronomist who in June visited farms in North and South Hwanghae provinces, in the west of the country.

Lee Young Hwa, who heads an Osaka, Japan-based human rights group that maintains contact with people inside North Korea, suspects the regime is stockpiling food in anticipation that it could be hit with international sanctions over its nuclear program.

“The food situation suddenly deteriorated in the beginning of June,” said Lee, of Rescue the North Korean People. “One explanation could be stockpiling.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in his New Year’s message named increasing grain production as the top priority for 2005. South Korean analysts have noted that in the past, such pronouncements reflected awareness of a poor crop and came before periods of famine.

Judging by its propaganda, the regime apparently believes a strong crop is necessary because of rising tensions with the U.S.

“Rice is our gun and our national power,” said an editorial that appeared in January in the leading official newspaper, Rodong Shinmun.

In May, the regime ordered up an unusually large mobilization of soldiers, government officials and office workers to help with such tasks as building irrigation ditches, weeding, building rice paddies and transplanting seedlings.

State-run media said there were twice as many people mobilized as in the previous year.