Agriculture

Along with industry, agriculture, now freed from the ages-old backwardness, constitutes the major thrust in the national economy.

The agrarian reform after the country’s liberation and the socialist agricultural cooperativization after the war brought about a rapid development of agriculture on the basis of the socialist ownership of production means.

Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in Our Country published by President Kim Il Sung is the programme for socialist rural construction which throws light on the way of solving the socialist rural question. Korea’s countryside has turned into a cultured socialist rural area with the irrigation, electrification, mechanization and chemicalization of agriculture vigorously promoted.

The country is striving to put all farming processes on an industrial, scientific and modern footing by relying on latest science and technology. It is breeding superior, high-yielding strains and following this up with the production of seeds that meet local demands for specific varieties. It is also developing potato farming and two-crop farming on a large scale.

Crops and varieties are distributed on the principle of sowing the right crop in the right soil and in the right season, and they are manured and cultivated in a scientific and technological way.

Advanced farming methods are actively introduced. Organic farming is encouraged and close concern is paid to establishing the food production cycle. The huge projects for land realignment are being stepped up, in addition to the irrigation projects for the development of the rural economy, and its comprehensive mechanization has attained a higher level in a short period of time.

All agricultural sectors, including crop cultivation, livestock farming, fruit farming and sericulture, are rapidly developing. Modern animal husbandry bases, fish farms, vegetable greenhouses, mushroom cultivation bases and “youth” orchards have sprung up across the country, thereby making a contribution to improving the people’s living standards.

The country is making sustained efforts to develop agriculture and increasing its investment in the countryside.

A Leading Comprehensive Fruit Production Base

The Taedonggang Combined Fruit Farm covers an area of over 1 000 ha, with a storehouse for storing thousands of tons of fruit, a general fruit processing plant producing fruit juices, jams and cosmetics, a dried fruit chip mill, an organic compound fertilizer plant, a pig farm, a terrapin farm, and stalls selling apples and terrapins. A food production cycle of fruit farming and animal husbandry has been established.

There are immense orchards in Kosan, Kwail, Pukchong and Toksong counties.

Socialist Countryside Transformed beyond Recognition

Kim Jong Il, on his inspection trip to the front line, dropped in at Taebaek-ri, Changdo County, Kangwon Province and unfolded a land-rezoning plan in Juche 87 (1998). True to the plan the struggle to realign the arable land was launched across the country-Kangwon, North Phyongan, South Hwanghae and South Phyongan provinces, and then Pyongyang and Nampho, thus opening a new history of the socialist countryside. The Kaechon-Lake Thaesong, Paengma­Cholsan and Miru Plain gravitational waterways supply water to the crop fields on the west coast of Korea.

Solar energy has brought benefits to agricultural workers living in the newly built three-or four-roomed houses roofed with colored tiles of Korean style.