* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Focus is on increasing output of produce like apples and potatoes that will improve people's health and keep them fed between harvests of the main local crops
Last month I made my first trip to North Korea. What was very striking was how much investment is going into the capital Pyongyang. There were tall skyscrapers, everything was very clean, there were a lot of parks for children. I was astonished how nice it looked.
But when you go out into the countryside you see thousands of people working away like ants in the fields. Everyone is very busy, transplanting seedlings with small hoes. You see very little machinery, very few tractors. Everything is done by hand. I also saw people digging a kilometre-long trench for cables, but even this was all being done with shovels.
What also struck me was that every last bit of land - even the tiniest patch beside the roads and between the houses - is used for agricultural production.
I visited South Hwanghae Province, which is three and a half hours’ drive south of Pyongyang. I don’t think there is a hunger crisis coming up, but you see that people are working extremely hard just to get their rice bowl filled, and agriculture overall is very vulnerable to drought and floods.
Our projects are trying to reduce people’s vulnerability. We have big orchards for apple production which are extremely important, particularly for providing children with vitamins. Micronutrients are a really big problem in North Korea. People live very much on staple foods, like rice and maize, and this is really affecting the growth of young children and their potential to reach their full mental and physical strength.
We also build greenhouses attached to clinics and kindergartens to improve children’s nutrition. This is often combined with the keeping of livestock like pigs and geese. In this way you can really ensure that the production stays in the villages. The co-operatives in North Korea are always obliged to hand over a certain percentage of their production to the government’s public distribution system (PDS). Projects like our greenhouses are designed so that there is a high probability that the food will stay with the local population.
We are also working with farmers to boost the cultivation of potatoes in order to prevent food shortages during the annual lean season when rice and maize stocks run out.
One thing that surprised me was that the North Koreans asked me about food deliveries and food-for-work projects. I found this quite astonishing because there isn’t a food crisis at the moment, but it’s not the first time they have done this. Maybe it’s because the government wants to show their people that the PDS is working, and for the system to work they need a constant flow of food. I guess there are certain shortages, but as is always the case with North Korea, who can really say? Who really has access to the data?
Working in North Korea is not easy. If we want to go to a project site in the countryside we have to apply for a travel permit and that takes two weeks. This is normally granted, but of course the government always keeps control. I told the authorities that we need to be able to access the project areas.
You also can’t hire technical staff or interpreters on the labour market. You have to wait for the ministries to assign them and this is a big problem because without them it’s very difficult to work.
But now we are facing a completely new problem in that we cannot get money into the country. We are one of six European aid agencies working in North Korea and we are all in the same boat.
It is not possible to transfer funds directly to North Korea so we normally transfer them via China, but the Bank of China has closed the accounts of North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank. This move was apparently prompted by the new U.N. sanctions, but humanitarian work is supposed to be exempt from these sanctions.
We need money to pay rent and salaries, but also supplies which we order from business people in North Korea – things like seeds, greenhouses and spare parts for machines.
I discussed the problem with the other aid agencies during my trip and everyone is very concerned. We also don’t know if the U.N. sanctions will impact us in other ways in the future.
In the end, if we can’t get money in there may come a point where we simply have to stop.
