Great Bulldozer
Far East Economic Review
Issue cover-dated April 19, 2001Aidan Foster-Carter of Leeds University reveals a disastrous agricultural policy steered by Kim Jong Il, and comments on the opportunities for engagement by the EU
TO ENGAGE or keep your distance? The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has stirred up the Korean peninsula with its aloof, if confused, attitude to North Korea. But if Bush won't engage, others will. The European Union, keen to be a player on the peninsula, will send Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson to Pyongyang and Seoul in early May to discuss missiles and mediate.
The goal of engaging North Korea is to force an end to dangerous behaviour. This matter is not merely military. North Korea is now in its sixth year of a food crisis which has cost the lives of at least one million people. Flood and drought may have been the catalysts, but the root problem remains the doubly disastrous mix of rigid planning and the whim of leaders, where pet projects get the lion's share of resources while less favoured regions and sectors are deprived.
The projects that paved the way for the food crisis included years of the overuse of inorganic fertilizers, which resulted in physical and chemical damage to soil; poorly planned hillside terracing; and the tearing down of forests to plant maize in the mountains. All this on top of the follies of collective farming, restricting private plots and markets.
North Korea is an ecological disaster, with the policies of Kim Jong Il and his father, late leader Kim Il Sung, to blame.
The follies continue. When Persson meets Kim Jong Il, let him ask about land rezoning, a project, more or less, to bulldoze North Korea flat and turn it into farmland. As the official Korean Central News Agency describes it, this is "a grand nature-harnessing work, to level at least 400,000 patches and remove 30,000 kilometres of ridges between rice fields which had been handed down through generations, and repartition them into standardized fields, each covering 1,000-1,500 pyong" (3,300 to 4,950 square metres). In Kim's plan, 100,000 hectares are due for flattening; 27,000 hectares have already been flattened, "changing their appearance beyond recognition."
In a speech to the annual Supreme People's Assembly on April 5, Prime Minister Hong Song Nam made clear the plan was central to the coming year's priority to "develop agriculture to resolve the food problem of the people."
The policy was first carried out in marginal farming areas in Kangwon. Kim delivered a speech on the plan in January last year--from the middle of a field. Standing in shiny shoes amid a sea of mud, Kim saw scenic nooks and hillocks bulldozed flat, and rejoiced.
The policy has now spread to Hwanghae, the rice-basket province in the southwest that is crucial to national food supply. On March 25, Vice-Marshal Jo Myong Rok, the country's top military official, who met President Bill Clinton at the White House last October, led a rally to promote more levelling before rice transplanting begins in May.
The theory: The creation of larger fields will allow the mechanization of agriculture and "free farmers from backbreaking work," as Kim said in his speech, repeating one of his father's favourite mantras. But mechanization is a pipe dream when the most hi-tech tool that most workers are armed with is a trowel, and tractors lie rusting for lack of fuel.
THE PROBLEM WITH KIM'S PLAN
The North Korean leader knows this, and has called for "strenuous efforts to repair [them] . . . as has been instructed before". He has pledged to supply 160 imported tractors, although North Korea is desperately short of foreign exchange and this could hardly help the whole country, just a favoured few.
Kim admits that rezoning won't raise yields immediately: "It is natural that the fertility of rezoned fields decreases," he said. So "the soil must be enriched by the application of rich organic fertilizer through a mass movement."
In fact, Kim has another motivation, and it has nothing to do with yields or labour-saving. "The fields in the Handure Plain . . . have been laid out well in regular shapes . . . . I am greatly satisfied," he said in last year's speech. "The plain has been completely transformed . . . . It would be impossible now for a former landowner to find his land, if he were to come with his land register to take his land back. The Handure Plain now looks like the land of a socialist state." Intriguing that the Dear Leader thinks the landlords who fled in the 1940s, or their children, might come back and claim their own--as has happened in Eastern Europe since communist rule collapsed. Is he afraid?
Worse, in North Korea's current conditions, the attempt to mechanize agriculture makes no economic sense. Experts including Marcus Noland of the Institute for International Economics in Washington say that Pyongyang should not even try to grow food. Instead, they say, it should seek comparative advantage in exporting light industrial goods, and import grain with the foreign exchange it earns, like South Korea.
As Persson knows, all who aid Pyongyang--and it's a long list--have the right to insist that policies and practices which killed a million or more North Koreans cease. The EU has added leverage in that it may soon propose the establishment of diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. The UN World Food Programme has its largest operation in the world there, and though other organizations such as Oxfam have pulled out, the WFP and many other non-governmental organizations look to be there for the duration. Yet rather than voice their concerns and insist on tighter conditionality, they have been coy to challenge the irrational policies which caused the crisis and which still go on.
The solution found in China and Vietnam--the development of family farms and markets--offers a good model. In January, Kim hinted that new times demand new methods. In reality, informal markets are the only thing standing between most North Koreans and starvation. But to openly embrace them seems to be too much for Kim Jong Il.
As for land rezoning, it's a new nadir. The fields of what is now North Korea were shaped by generations of human labour down the centuries, and bulldozing them is comparable to the Taliban's irreversible destruction of Afghanistan's prized Buddhas.
What can be addressed is the fact that seven-year-old North Koreans, according to data analyzed by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, are 20 centimetres shorter and 10 kilogrammes lighter than their southern peers. Persson and Kim should have a lot to talk about.