Despite recent events in North Korea, which have led to the United States withdrawing food aid destined for the hermitic country, a report in Agroforestry Systems Journal, suggests international researchers working together with rural communities are managing to transform deforested areas into sustainable, resilient food systems.

Following a failed rocket launch last month, which DPR Korea claimed was a satellite but the USA and its allies said was a missile test, the United States withdrew food aid and the state attracted condemnation from the international community. Denied 240,000 tonnes of food aid from the United States, North Korea has opted to ramp up its weapons testing programmes.

There had been much criticism over the way food aid is distributed within North Korea, with aid agencies warning it goes primarily to military and political high-ups. North Korea’s "Military First" policy, which prioritises the army in the allocation of resources, means much aid does not reach those who needed it.  

However, a report from international researchers last month showed that through gaining hard-won land rights, rural communities are benefitting from low-impact agriculture projects which are forming resilient food systems and enabling them to take control of their food supply.

DPR Korea suffered a massive famine in the mid-1990s that is estimated to have killed around one million people. Triggered by a combination of the withdrawal of favourable trade conditions with the former Soviet Union and an inefficient agricultural production system, the famine led to widespread conversion of forested sloping land to food and fuel uses, which resulted in soil erosion and landslides in a country already subject to extreme weather.

The extensive deforestation meant the country’s forest cover was reduced by 25 per cent between 1990 and 2005. As well as suffering the effects of land degradation, North Korea is prone to extreme weather, including Typhoons, which lead to flash flooding.

Community groups obtain land-use rights to plant trees

In the early 2000s, in order to reverse degradation, increase yields and generate more income from mountains and hills, the Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection introduced the Sloping Land Management project.

Under the project, innovative agroforestry technologies have been used to provide food and fodder, while restoring degraded land affected by deforestation and unsuitable, damaging agricultural uses. By 2011, several hundred sloping-land user groups, made up primarily of retirees, who were most severely affected by the lack of access to the public food distribution system, were operating throughout the country.

These groups managed to obtain rights-to-use, rights-to-harvest and rights-to-plan on sloping lands for tree products and food. Gaining these rights is a novel development in North Korea, according to the report’s authors, and enabled local communities to work together, supported by agricultural and forestry scientists.

 Xu Jian Chu, lead author of the report and head of the East Asia Node of the World Agroforestry Centre, commented, “The emergence of agroforestry as a way of managing sloping land highlights how food technology innovations can take root once social and institutional constraints to land access have been reduced. We wanted the groups to continue to be self-supporting if trials proved successful. We only provided technical support on a regular basis”

The researchers and community groups compiled a range of recommendations to spread the benefit of the practice throughout similarly damaged areas. These included providing agroforestry demonstrations, pushing for innovations in double-cropping annual food crops with non-competitive foods or timber, and improving use of geographic information technology and agroforestry education.

The researchers said that, following the success of the initial studies, agroforestry is now influencing policy in parts of the country. They said that the process has potential to be rolled out further, however, they stated that this would be dependent on “the continued opening of land-use rights beyond sloping land for local people.”

The report’s authors concluded, “It is critical that information about best practices continues to reach policymakers so that they can understand the issues and create more effective policies. Further development will require increased engagement with agricultural and horticultural agencies, while the social dimensions of participatory agroforestry continue to provide rich learning.”

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