Forest supervision officers in North Korea have sharply intensified enforcement activity in April as authorities push forward with the country’s second-phase reforestation drive, with locals in South Pyongan province saying the officers have become more feared than the police.
A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK on Tuesday that forest supervision officers and forest protection officers (state forestry officials responsible for monitoring compliance with planting quotas and preventing unauthorized logging and land use) had become noticeably more active across Kaechon city, Anju city, and Tokchon city in recent weeks. The area is home to a concentration of coal mines, making unregulated logging a persistent problem and forest protection a high-priority concern for authorities.
The source said inspections of tree planting performance, survival rates, and management records had grown more frequent, and that the pressure on workers, students, and local people had increased considerably as a result.
From lenient to zero-tolerance
Previously, forest supervision and protection officers maintained a relatively relaxed relationship with local people, the source said. An informal system allowed people to clear hillside farmland, gather wild berries and medicinal plants, and collect firewood in exchange for payments or favors to officers willing to look the other way.
That arrangement has broken down entirely. “Now, if you let something slide and it comes up at a self-criticism session” (a mandatory group review meeting in which officials and workers are required to confess shortcomings and criticize one another) “you get criticized on the spot and held personally responsible,” the source said. “So protecting your own position has become more important than maintaining goodwill with local people, and enforcement has become completely different from before. Far more coercive.”
Officers are currently conducting direct field verification of the tree planting results that workplaces and schools reported following Tree Planting Day on March 14. Where units are found to have submitted inflated figures, or where survival rates are deemed insufficient, officers are visiting those units in person to assign responsibility and demand remedial work.
The reaction among local people has been exasperation. “With the police you can at least smooth things over with money, but the forestry side doesn’t let anything go these days,” one local person was quoted as saying.
The source attributed the change to the growing prominence of reforestation as a performance verification priority. Unlike many other policy areas where numbers can be inflated without easy detection, the results of reforestation work are directly observable from satellite imagery and subject to external scrutiny.
“Reforestation is not a program you can just pad the numbers on and get away with it,” the source said. “Officials compare what was reported against what is actually on the ground and go through it item by item, so forest supervision and protection officers are under more pressure than anyone.”
The source added that enforcement is expected to tighten further as the second-phase reforestation drive continues. “Local people are already saying that friction between forestry officers and the community is going to become more frequent,” the source said.
North Korea is currently running a series of mass campaigns tied to the second-phase reforestation drive, including a “socialist patriotic forest” initiative and a campaign among counties to win the designation of “model forest county.” Tree planting is framed in official propaganda as an expression of patriotism to encourage broad participation. Among local people, however, the campaign has drawn quiet mockery: the common refrain, according to the source, is “They’re telling us to do the second reforestation drive, but when exactly did the first one happen?”
Reporting from inside North Korea
Daily NK operates networks of sources inside North Korea who document events in real-time and transmit information through secure channels. Unlike reporting based on state media, satellite imagery, or defector accounts from years past, our journalism comes directly from people currently living under the regime. We verify reports through multiple independent sources and cross-reference details before publication.
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April 21, 2026 at 11:50PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)