North Korea Limits School Hours to Mobilize Students For Drought Measures.
North Korea’s government has reduced school hours in a bid to mobilize students to combat a severe drought affecting the country’s farms, according to sources, who say the public is frustrated that Kim Jong Un’s regime is conducting missile tests instead of devoting state resources to the problem.
The sources from two provinces in northern North Korea, near the border with China, told RFA’s Korean Service this week that all students in high school or above are required to water crops for hours in the morning before classes, which now begin later in the day, amid a lack of precipitation.
One source from Yanggang province, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that a month of government efforts to irrigate state farms had fallen short and crops are experiencing drought damage, brought on in part by one of the worst rainfall shortages in recent years.
“[For our region,] damage to corn, soybeans, and potatoes is serious, with damage to corn being most severe.” A second source from neighboring Chagang province, who also asked not to be named, told RFA that farms in several parts of his region were also failing due to the drought.
“Chunggang county [150 kilometers north of Manpo along the Yalu] is experiencing even more severe drought damage than Manpo, since the county’s main crop is corn.” Students mobilized To better manage irrigation of the crops, the source said, educational institutions had been assigned an equal number of collective farms to attend to.
“High school and college students have been mobilized for watering crops from 5:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. each day, and their classes now begin from 11:00 a.m.,” he said.
But he added that the drought “cannot be fought with simple manpower,” as merely using water containers to irrigate the crops is ineffective.
Instead, water pumps are needed to deliver water to farms from nearby rivers, the source said, while fire trucks should be deployed to transport water to farms located too far from water sources.
The move caused great discontent among locals, many of whom shop for food and other necessities during the day.