North Korea To Embark On Major Agricultural Reform: Report
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North Korean leaders are likely to discuss major economic reforms, including a plan to allow farmers to keep up to half of their agricultural produce, during a meeting of the Supreme Peoples’ Assembly on Tuesday, told an unnamed source to Reuters this week.
North Korean leaders are likely to discuss major economic reforms, including a plan to allow farmers to keep up to half of their agricultural produce, during a meeting of the Supreme Peoples’ Assembly on Tuesday, told an unnamed source to Reuters this week.
The source, who purportedly has close ties to both Pyongyang and Beijing, said that the move to liberalise agriculture, in particular, would reverse a crackdown on private production that began in 2005, while opening the door to more economic reforms in the future as part of an “economic adjustment.”
[quote]”Peasants will have incentive to grow more food. They can keep and sell in the market about 30-50 percent of their harvest depending on the region,” said the source.[/quote]Related: North Korea Increases Trade Dependency on China
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On Tuesday, the approximately 700 member-strong Supreme Peoples’ Assembly will assemble in Pyongyang for the second time this year – a rare occurrence given that a body seldom meet at all, going four years in the 1990s without ever meeting.
According to Reuters’s source, the phrase “economic adjustment” was carefully worded so as not to upset the nation’s political and social structure. Choi Kang-hyuk, a leader of a defector group called North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, told the Wall Street Journal that North Koreans were often worried to hear news of economic reform, as past such changes had proven to be ineffectiveness and even counter productive.
The last major economic change – a redenomination of the nation’s currency in 2009 –for instance wiped out citizens’ private savings.
[quote]”They don’t believe in their own government,” said Mr. Choi, who left North Korea in 2002 but keeps in phone contact with people there. “They are expecting a change, but they aren’t sure.”[/quote]In fact, according to a North Korean defector site (www.dailynk.com), the latest round of proposed agricultural reform may have already spooked citizens – the price of rice has more than doubled at the end of August from the start of June.
Citing Russia’s own problems after the fall of the Soviet Union, Andrei Lankov, a Russian professor at Seoul’s Kookmin University, told AFP that “a reforming North Korea will likely be very unstable and might collapse.”
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Yang Moo-Jin at the University of North Korean Studies however said that, “reforms are always risky in a closed totalitarian country but Jong-Un appears to be confident that his leadership is now stable enough to enforce a new system.”
[quote]”The new leader is ready to push for gradual economic reforms in earnest as long as such changes will not rattle the country’s political system,” Yang noted.[/quote]
