Food Security or Food Sovereignty? Agricultural Technology Reforms after the Famine in North Korea

How did North Koreans reform their agricultural technology after the massive famine in the 1990s? While the existing literature focuses its analysis on the nexus between the state and market to assess the possibility of a transition economy, we instead examine agricultural methods and technologies employed in farmlands to evaluate the nature of technological reforms. After identifying technology reforms on the basis of primary sources published in the DPRK such as yearbooks, academic journals, and newspaper articles, as well as other materials published in South Korea, Japan, and the United States and by international organizations, we classify them into two kinds of initiatives: modernization measures that sought to address the failure to modernize agricultural technologies and ecology-friendly farming practices designed to reduce or reverse negative externalities of the industrial agriculture. While the two are commonly seen as incompatible, we conclude that North Koreans synthesized the two to transform their decaying industrial agriculture into a more modernized and more ecology-friendly sector. They have, through these reforms, maintained food sovereignty as their pillar of agriculture but complemented it with food security on a national scale as a way to maximize their agriculture outputs. Most of these initiatives seem to continue to date although it remains to be seen how these initiatives have affected or will affect the overall productivity and sustainability of the agricultural sector.

粮食安全还是粮食主权？朝鲜大饥荒之后的农业技术改革

关键词：朝鲜（DPRK）, 金正恩时代，农业（农业崩溃/农业改革），现代化，生态友好型农业，粮食安全，粮食主权

上世纪九十年代大饥荒之后，朝鲜人民是怎样改革他们的农业技术的？ 虽然现有的文献都集中在分析政府与市场之间的联系上，以评估一种过渡型经济的可能性，但我们t通过考察应用于农田上的农业方法和技术来评估技术改革的性质。我们根据朝鲜发表的诸如年鉴、学术期刊、报刊文章等一手资料以及韩国、日本和美国以及国际组织的出版材料鉴别出技术改革之后，将其归为两种新举措：寻求解决现代农业技术失败的现代化措施和旨在减少或者扭转工业化农业的负面外部性的生态友好型农业实践。尽管通常认为这两者互不相容，但我们得出的结论是，朝鲜对二者加以综合，将其日渐没落的工业化农业转型为更现代、更生态友好的部门。通过这些改革，他们维护了粮食主权作为农业支柱的地位，但是在国家规模上以粮食安全加以补充，以最大化提高粮食产出。大多数这些举措似乎至今仍在继续，但它们怎样并将如何影响农业部门的生产力和可持续性尚待继续观察。

Translated by Li Guo