North Korea, with help from Ireland, is turning to the potato to combat a famine caused by shortages of grain and rice. The Irish aid agency Concern Worldwide is at the forefront of an international aid project to develop seed potatoes in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and improve the quality and quantity of local potatoes.
The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, has turned agricultural history on its head in the reclusive communist country by decreeing that in future the potato should be considered not as additional food but as the country's main food. In an unusually candid comment, he said that people might not have suffered from hunger if the DPRK had revamped its potato-growing project 10 years ago.
Locally-grown potatoes in North Korea are of poor quality and are cultivated mainly for making noodles. Rice and maize are the staples, but crop yields have been devastated for four years by weather-related catastrophes and economic breakdown. The idea of developing potatoes came from a combination of events, according to Mr Paddy Maguinness, deputy chief executive of Concern Worldwide. "The DPRK was looking for ways to use their upland areas," he said in Dublin. "We introduced potatoes in Ethiopia during the famine there, and were very conscious that potatoes could be a life-saver for them."
When a three-man delegation from North Korea visited Ireland in March last year, officials from Concern and Trocaire took them to Louth, where they were shown how the smallest county in Ireland has managed to become the largest per capita potato producer. Concern has supplied 1,300 tonnes of the 4,000 tons of seed potatoes brought into North Korea in recent months. These were purchased in China and planted in late March, said Mr Tim Roberts, agricultural programme manager for Concern in North Korea, who is based in the capital, Pyongyang, along with Concern technical adviser Mr Richard Hamilton. "It is a gamble but we are going for it," said Mr Roberts. "Before now potatoes were grown in a small way on family plots and they didn't have an organised seed production system. But the ground and the climate between March and June is good for potatoes if there is enough rain."
North Korea also received 100 tonnes of seed potatoes from the United States three weeks ago, as the first part of a 1,000-ton consignment under a mid-April deal allowing the US to inspect a possible nuclear weapons site. But the potatoes arrived late for spring planting and may be wiped out in the ground by disease in the hot and humid summer. Aid workers based in Pyongyang say the state media are creating a potato culture, eulogising the root vegetable with slogans and stirring songs, and reporting joyful peasants and soldiers working in the potato fields. North Korean officials are now being sent all over the world to study potato cultivation.
The "respected and beloved general", Kim Jong-il, has made potatoes the rage, according to a recent article in the DPRK newspaper Nodong Sinmun. It reported him as saying measures must be introduced for making "delicious food" with potatoes. "There was no aspect and domain to which the great general's contemplation, efforts and toil had not reached regarding potatoes," it said. The general "is indeed a peerless patriot, who devotes everything to the fatherland and to the people and is the benevolent father of the nation. No others can make such noble footprints on every page of history. As such, the history of revolution in potato farming on this land is incomparably sublime and sacred."
Concern Worldwide is carrying out projects worth more than £1.3 million in the DPRK, Mr Maguinness said. Concern is one of seven aid agencies, five UN bodies and a number of US organisations working under one umbrella to alleviate famine there. The UN World Food Programme is appealing for more food aid to help people over the most dangerous months of May and June before the harvest is brought in. At this time of year, according to Mr David Morton, the WFP representative in North Korea, millions of people are forced to eat wild plants and noodles and cakes made of indigestible grasses and cornstalks.