In May of this year, a Mercy Corps delegation of eleven people, plus our leader Ells Culver, Senior Vice President and Co-Founder at Mercy Corps, left Portland on an unusual journey. Perhaps the most fascinating part was our five days in the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) commonly known elsewhere as North Korea.

From my perspective, what we found both confirmed expectations and surprised me in several ways. The absence of individual and economic freedoms was anticipated. In fact, while we were there, the government confiscated cell phones, which had, apparently, been part of an experiment that they decided to end. Other than a fairly healthy appearing agricultural program, we saw little evidence of productive economic activity. There were very few cars on the roads and very little prosperity affecting ordinary citizens.

Their national philosophy, which is called juche, reflects their commitment to self-sufficiency. This is not individual self-sufficiency, but rather a national self-sufficiency. This makes their government reluctant to accept help from others. Even when they had the tragedy of an explosion on a train killing hundreds just a few weeks before our arrival, they were reluctant to accept aid from South Korea. A couple of trains came through the DMZ with food and medical supplies from the south but were later stopped.

In 1995 they had a terrible siege of rain and flooding that made much of the arable land unproductive for several years. Estimates of those dying from hunger during that period are between one and three million people. This is a disaster for any country but here it represented something close to ten per cent of their total population, which today is about 23 million.

Until the fall of the Soviet Union they had received significant capital investment from the Soviets. The industrial production resulting from those investments helped keep them relatively prosperous during those years but lack of maintenance and new investment has caused their industry to dwindle away.

What was a pleasant surprise was the appearance of the country and their people. Having lived through the period of the Korean War, my only recollections of North Korea were newsreels of our troops fighting their way up the barren gray hills during the cold and snowy winters, of course, all on black and white TV. In reality it is a beautiful country. Although only 18% of the land is arable, the farmlands we saw were lush green and looked quite productive.

The absence of individual and economic freedoms in North Korea was anticipated. But what was a pleasant surprise was the country and the people themselves. It was quite beautiful, and the people friendly and welcoming.

The primary purpose of our trip was to observe the apple orchard project of Mercy Corps in the countryside south of Pyongyang, the capital. Most recently Mercy Corps had flown some 110,000 apple rootstocks for planting in a very large fruit farm in the souther part of the county. The shipment was made in March of this year just short a few weeks before our arrival. It was very heartening to see them all planted and thriving in what appears to be a well-managed orchard of 8,000 hectares, approximately 20,000 acres.

Not knowing just what a rootstock was, I asked. Instead of planting these rootstocks to grow a single tree, they are planted and then bent over parallel to and lying on the ground. Shoots will grow out of each rootstock. These shoots are harvested and each will create a tree. The number of shoots produced from a single rootstock normally increases each year so that after five years eight shoots might be produced. So each rootstock may ultimately produce several tens? of apple trees???. The 110,000 rootstocks in Mercy Corps latest shipment will produce hundreds of thousands of apple trees, a great bounty of food for the people in this area.

Overall, the review we were given of their work was evidence of a well-managed project that provides both food and jobs, tending the trees and harvesting the crops. We were told that when the rootstock arrived in March all of the some 80,000 people of the county were called out to get them planted quickly. Even if that was a bit of an exaggeration, picturing it demonstrates their gratitude for the opportunities that Mercy Corps had provided to them.

During our drive to the orchard we passed a number of small towns and villages. The people we saw had reasonable clothes and we saw no evidence of hunger, although the weather was warm and we might have had a different experience had it been the kind of winter we had seen on TV during the war.

The people we saw were very friendly towards us. We visited a hospital in the area and as we assembled in front of the hospital all the windows were filled with smiling faces of the patients and their nurses. The hospital was extremely basic with very little equipment but clean and well organized.

Although their leadership has the example of vibrant economic growth which neighboring China has experienced since they opened up to the market economy, they seem very reluctant to follow this example. They have just recently begun another experiment and allowed a kind of farmers market in Pyongyang, where individuals are allowed to sell produce and a few other things for their own gain. It is a small, hopeful movement in the right direction. Significant movement, however, will probably be very slow to arrive

During our entire visit we never had the opportunity to speak with anyone unobserved. Our guides and interpreters felt like our friends, and they were, but they were also representatives of their government and did not let us do or photograph anything that was on the prohibited list.

When we departed Pyongyang to return to Beijing it was a very diverse mix of feelings; beauty, thanks for the orchard project, friendship, but only small inklings of hope for the freedom and prosperity for the peoples of North Korea.






Contributed by William Early, Senior Vice President, JELD-WEN, inc and Founder of Global Envision.

To read another Global Envision article about agriculture by Bill Early, see Change Agricultural Subsidies to Provide Opportunity for the World’s Poor.