North Korean farmers risk penalties if too many potatoes left in the ground

This undated picture released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on April 4, 2019 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, second from left, inspecting a potato factory in Samjiyon County.

North Korean farm managers who are not carefully harvesting their potato crops – leaving some behind – are getting in trouble with authorities, residents with links to the agricultural sector told Radio Free Asia.

Inspectors recently swooped down on several collective farms in the northern potato-growing region of Ryanggang province to check the fields. “The inspectors drove around in cars and dug up every nook and cranny of the potato fields on the farm,” a resident who works in agriculture said on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

“If the inspectors conclude that the fall harvest was not done properly, the farms must redo it until they pass the inspection,” another provincial resident said.

The reason behind the checks appears to be that farmers are spending more time tending their personal fields than the collective farm’s lots, the sources said.

In North Korea’s collective farming system, farmers are paid the standard government salary to work the land, and then all crops are collected by the state and distributed to the people. But since the collapse of the country’s economy in the 1990s, that salary is nowhere near enough to live on.

Bales of straw in North Korean fields after the rice harvest, as seen from the Ganghwa Peace Observatory across the border in South Korea, Sept. 23, 2024. (Yonhap News)

So the farmers, like everyone else, must support themselves by other means – and are planting their own personal potato patches–usually on land surrounding their homes. The potatoes grown there are either eaten or sold for extra income.

When harvest time comes around, citizens are mobilized to provide free labor to the farm managers, who order them to quickly dig up the collective farms just to make quota by the Sept. 30 deadline.

The farm managers have a tendency to not to watch the collective farms too, and they acknowledge that they are mostly going through the motions, the first resident said. “They are working so irresponsibly to the point that they joke that the mobilized workers are ‘digging for potatoes with their eyes closed,’” he said.

Farmers beware

But the government wants them to be more thorough, so it is sending inspection teams to check.

“The Cabinet Agricultural Commission dispatched a 20-member harvest inspection team in Hyesan City on Sept. 26,” the second Ryanggang resident said, referring to a city in the province.

Punishments for farm officials who fail inspections can be harsh, he said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspects potato fields and agricultural machinery warehouses while touring a farm in Samjiyon county, Ryanggang province, in July 2018. (Yonhap News)

Last year, many farm officials in the province were expelled from the Workers’ Party, and they lost all the housing and employment privileges that go with membership, and some were even sent to prison because they were sloppy in their management of the harvest.

“Farm officials can’t sleep at night because they think something like that could happen to them right now,” the first resident said.

At a farm in the city of Hyesan, the harvest was completed on Sept. 27, but then the workers were remobilized, that is, called to provide unpaid labor once again, when they heard that the inspection team had arrived.

“They even mobilized middle and high school students to complete the harvest again,” he said. “The farm officials would rather miss the deadline than fail the inspection.”

Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

By:RFA