North Korea promoted nationwide tree-planting initiatives for Arbor Day (March 14) as part of a reforestation campaign. However, these efforts damaged forests as people uprooted healthy trees to meet transplantation quotas.
A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently that on March 5, the provincial party committee ordered all organizations, enterprises, schools, and neighborhood watch units in Chongjin to carry out tree-planting projects.
These directives included planting trees not only on hillsides but also along roadsides for urban beautification. The roadside plantings, however, required adult trees 2-3 meters tall rather than saplings, forcing people to transplant mature trees from surrounding hills.
For these projects, Chongjin residents often travelled 15 kilometers or more outside the city to collect trees from distant woods. They deliberately avoided forests within city limits, where police officers were stationed to catch anyone attempting to remove trees.
While collecting trees from designated forests carries no penalties, unauthorized tree removal could result in fines or even capital punishment.
Rather than traveling to officially designated forests—located over 100 kilometers away—Chongjin residents evaded police patrols to access closer, unauthorized wooded areas.
“Factories assigned teams to transplant trees for Arbor Day. But given how difficult it is to bring trees back from the designated forests, people just collected them from nearby areas,” the source explained.
With so many unauthorized trees being taken for these planting projects, some people joked that the holiday should be renamed “Larceny Day” instead of “Arbor Day.”
A more significant problem was the extremely low survival rate of these transplanted trees.
North Korean authorities emphasized not only planting trees but also maintaining them. The government required trees to be tagged with the names of the companies and individuals who planted them, who are then responsible for their care.
However, transplanted trees have a survival rate below 30%.
“Most planted trees will wither and die without proper care. Despite annual Arbor Day plantings, none of our cities have wooded areas,” the source said.
“The government calls tree planting patriotic, but for ordinary people, it’s just another meaningless work assignment. If we stopped planting trees on Arbor Day, the hills would actually have more tree cover,” the source concluded.
March 19, 2025 at 04:00AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)