North Korean farmers are growing increasingly resentful as the ruling party’s interference in their autonomy reaches new extremes. While authorities boast of an unprecedented harvest, farmers have seen little income and are desperately seeking ways to survive the difficult spring months.
In the country’s agricultural heartlands – including Mundok, Sukchon, and Pyongwon in South Pyongan province’s Sohae Plain – farmers are resorting to risky money-making ventures while struggling under excessive state restrictions.
According to a source, the party secretary of Taejong village in Pyongwon county recently ordered the confiscation of two months’ worth of grain from farmers who haven’t been working since the beginning of the year. Workers on the village’s collective farm had received a six-month grain allocation per person, and confiscating one-third of this essentially condemns these individuals to starvation.
Farmers across rural South Pyongan province have turned to alternative income sources such as digging for clams and oysters along the Yellow Sea coast and panning for gold to survive the winter. So many desperate farmers have descended on coastal clam habitats that locals joke “people outnumber clams.” Visit any gold panning site along the rivers and fields of Pyongwon, Taedong, or Kaechon, and you’ll find farmers consumed with the search for precious metal.
These farmers are simply trying to survive, yet the state not only fails to help them supplement their income but actively takes away their food. Many farmers compare officials to “wicked cops during the Japanese colonial era.” The authorities constantly refer to themselves as the “mother party,” but as farmers bitterly note, what mother would take away her children’s food and leave them to starve?
North Korean ruling party bureaucrats continue to seek solutions to food shortages by demanding increased agricultural production based on loyalty. This approach is fundamentally flawed. Data shows that agricultural household income has returned to levels not seen since the “Arduous March” famine of 30 years ago, with farmers receiving less than 60% of their previous annual grain allocation, while urban workers’ average income has fallen by more than half.
For over 70 years, North Korean authorities have emphasized “rural development,” but ideological control and forced loyalty have proven ineffective. Ensuring farmers’ autonomy is the only way for North Korea to escape its reputation as a “bad beggar” condemned as one of the world’s poorest and most rights-abusing nations.
If North Koreans are to avoid starvation, authorities must grant farmers economic autonomy so they can feed themselves and improve rural incomes.
March 11, 2025 at 11:04AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)