18 Dec 2007 05:53:19 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Jon Herskovitz and Kang Shinhye

SUWON, South Korea, Dec 18 (Reuters) – A South Korean province is backing a rare project to help famine-prone North Korea grow more food and bring production up to the level of its much richer neighbour.

Gyeonggi province, which circles Seoul and shares a border with the North, has set up a three-year programme to turn about 400 hectares (1,000 acres) near the North’s capital of Pyongyang into productive farm land.

“North Korea is impoverished. They need emergency aid and we also need to provide support to increase agricultural production,” Gyeonggi’s governor, Kim Moon-soo, said in an interview with Reuters.

It is one of only a few joint projects despite recent warming ties between the two countries which have yet to agree a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War.

The results have been promising in a state that constantly battles with food shortages.

The pilot farm produces about 5 tonnes of rice per hectare, about the same as in South Korea, and far ahead of an estimated 3 tonnes per hectare on average in North Korea.

Gyeonggi provides North Korea with fertiliser, rice seeds best suited for its soil, tools, tractors and agrarian experts from the South’s most populous province which also has some of its most productive farms. The North supplies the manpower.

International aid agencies say after decades of collective farming the communist North’s agrarian sector is a mess, even though it accounts for about 30 percent of its economy.

Deforestation makes the capricious and paranoid state especially susceptible to floods. It lacks fuel for tractors, fertiliser and a coherent plan to increase production, international aid agencies have said.

U.N. agencies, which have long been in the North feeding the country’s hungry, said its harvest in 2006 fell short by about 800,000 tonnes of the amount needed to properly feed its people.

The North, which lost at least 1 million of its 23 million population to famine in the 1990s, has relied on food handouts from South Korea, China and the World Food Programme.

“I don’t think it would be easy for other international organisations to initiate a similar type of project,” Kim said.

A journey that should be just four hours by road can take Gyeonggi officials up to four days because of complex paperwork and a ban on most direct travel which means they must fly there via China. Supplies can sometimes take a month to arrive.

The province wants to set up other joint farms for pigs and chickens plus a tree nursery closer to the border it shares with the North.

“For others to conduct similar projects, they must have a lot of patience,” Kim said.

(Writing by Jon Herskovitz, Editing by Rosalind Russell)