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| China-Japan-Koreas | ||
| N. Korea offering incentives to farmers: WFP | ||
| 2013-11-30 | ||
SEOUL -- North Korea is offering incentives to farmers who are productive, while cutting food rations for those who under-perform, a United Nations agency said Friday.
It said the move seems to be aimed at getting people to produce more and inject some spirit of competitiveness into the farming sector. The findings are based on interviews carried by the WFP and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, which sent a fact-finding team to the communist country from late September through mid October. The organizations talked to people from 77 households from 51 cooperative farms. The country suffers from chronic food shortage with local food output unable to meet demand without foreign assistance. It said productive farmers have been known to take home 65 kilograms worth of extra rations for a three month period from the cooperative he or she works for, depending on output. The WFP findings, on the other hand, showed some people have not received food rations from the state for up to four months. The food program, meanwhile, said that North Korea's rice production is expected to reach a little over 2.90 million tons this fall, up 8.2 percent compared to 2.68 million tons tallied in 2012. It said output per hectare of rice paddy reached 5.3 tons on average, up from 4.8 tons the year before. The WFP said of the total population, 16 percent are not suffering from food shortages, although conditions for the rest are not as good. It said from November of this year to October 2014, the communist country will need an extra 340,000 tons of food to sufficiently feed its people.
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #2 "If you can't produce (Ungodly ammounts) of food, others can." |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2013-11-30 17:14 |
| #1 Army first. |
| Posted by: gorb 2013-11-30 13:36 |