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.