The Korean Miracle’s Rural Legacy

Alex Witherspoon, Yu Zhou, and Alle Fang give an account of socialist agriculture in rural North Korea, arguing that the difficulties faced by the country’s economy have been primarily caused by deteriorating trade conditions.
Read By Allen Lanterman 

Introduction

The trials and successes of North Korea’s seventy plus years in rural development may largely be viewed as concrete results of Marxian political economic principles applied to  the DPRK’s specific geographic and historical conditions. In order to develop radical political economy, the development of North Korea’s countryside and the Soviet theoretical models which informed it can and should be studied. Looking at statistical and historical evidence, it can be shown that North Korea once enjoyed spectacular gains in agricultural output and overall physical quality of life. Despite severe crises in the past two and a half decades, North Korea continues to boast a relatively superior material standard of living thanks to central planning when compared to Capitalist economies at the same level of per capita income. We argue that the inability to trade, not faulty planning mechanisms or lack of production enthusiasm is the primary factor in North Korea’s food insecurity. Understanding the means, costs, and benefits by which socialist planning and collective agriculture have managed to survive in North Korea are critical for all socialist third world activists and scholars’ whose nation may face similar difficulties. 

Key Words: North Korea, Economic Planning, Rural Development

North Korea is today among the poorest countries in Asia and is part of a very small club of countries who still refer to themselves as socialist. For the past few decades, many people have grown into adulthood with the perception that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was and is a stillborn economy, a living nightmare of a nation in perpetual famine and on the brink of collapse. To be sure, consistent barrages of Western media misinformation and well compensated defector accounts have in part created this image. Yet, the past scale of defectors and food assistance programs are testaments to very real economic woes that took place in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Pyongyang officials have long recognized the severity of these issues themselves.

Recent Marxist analysis of Korean socialism is scarce, especially in academic publications. Reactionary bourgeois scholars instead seem to have the most to say about North Korea today. Yet fifty, forty, or even thirty years ago, the DPRK was a success story for many Leftist academics and activists. In 1965, Joan Robinson herself submitted an article to the Monthly Review detailing the country’s unrivaled post-war recovery. Anti-colonial activists like Walter Rodney also had nothing but praise for the economic dimensions of Korean Socialism.¹ When, then, did it all go wrong? Understanding the specific “why’s” and “how’s” of socialist development in the DPRK is critical to the practical development of the Marxist agrarian project. Understanding the especially contentious area of North Korea’s socialist rural development is even more important as issues of sustainability and self-sufficiency given our present historical situation. Should revolutionary peasant movements in the Philippines or India expand their “liberated areas” or should the Nepalese government decide to break from market-based solutions, they will face many of the same challenges as North Korea. They will need to feed their population under conditions of external counter-revolutionary siege, insufficient fuel, and an unfavorable land per tiller ratio. Only by understanding North Korea’s experience can we realistically appreciate the challenges the Marxist agrarian project faces in the developing world.   

Historical Course of North Korea’s Rural Development

Agriculture in North Korea has always been challenged by the nation’s natural terrain. 75% of the country’s land mass is classified as hilly or mountainous.² As a consequence, arable land is scarce. In 1992, at the high water moment for North Korean agriculture, arable land per capita stood at just 0.11 hectares.³ That is three times less than Cuba and five times less than the former Soviet Union that year. Just as in China, this inherent demographic pressure has made grain production an area of constant attention for the DPRK government.⁴ Through three generations of leadership, the Workers Party of Korea has developed a living system of socialist rural development. The system’s basic form matured in the 1960’s. Since then, the primary production unit of agriculture has been the Collective Farm. Within a given farm, land and housing is owned collectively by the resident members. It may neither be privately rented or sold. Some private plots do exist within these farms, but the produce of these plots may only be sold directly at designated farmers’ markets. All of this and more is laid out in Kim Il Sung’s foundational text of North Korean rural policy, Rural Theses.⁵ Completely in line with orthodox Soviet political economy, Kim called for the abolition of the rural and urban divide in material well-being and stressed the need to build the conditions for the transformation of collective in state property.⁶ All of this necessitated a rapid modernization of agriculture achieved through agro-industrial inputs, irrigation, electrification, and the planned distribution of agricultural experts. Kim planned for all of this to happen as agricultural taxes would be gradually abolished.⁷

Rural North Korea: A Success Story (1955-1992)

These grand transformations started as North Korea emerged from centuries of feudal land tenure, decades of Japanese colonial occupation, and a devastating civil war. In the Korean War, 12 to 15% of the nation’s population died and virtually all of the industrial infrastructure was destroyed.⁸ The nation was rebuilt from the rubble, peasants in part footed the bill. They were initially burdened with a 25% post-war agricultural tax. Between 1946 and 1963, most producers however benefited first from land reform and then multiple rounds of state investment. With the landlords defeated and national reconstruction drawing to a close, the North Korean government began to pour more and more money into agricultural infrastructure like irrigation. Between 1959 and 1963, 15.8% of annual state capital investment went to such projects.⁷ The agricultural tax was also able to be reduced to a rate of 8.4%. These were the first fruits of North Korea’s rural development policies.

Between 1964 and 1992, North Korea’s rural modernization steadily progressed along the path laid down in Kim Il Sung’s Theses. By 1974, rural household electrification had reached 100% and the agricultural tax was already totally replaced by compensated state procurement. Meanwhile, by 1984 North Korea’s original arable land area had been increased by 16% thanks to land reclamation along the coasts and in the mountains.⁹ Meanwhile, by 1990, chemical fertilizer production had grown from the pre-war figure of 300,000 tons to some 850,000 tons.¹⁰ Under a series of coordinated national economic plans, all of these material changes allowed grain production to grow some five times between 1946 and 1984, double the growth rate of South Korean grain production. The nation was grain self-sufficient by the 1980’s. In this period, the majority of North Korea’s population also became urbanized. Contrary to the experiences of some socialist nations, for those who stayed behind in the country’s collective farms, production enthusiasm and policy satisfaction remained generally high. Meredith Woo-Cummings has opined that this may in part have come from the relatively small size of production teams.¹¹ The basic unit of collective farming remained small, keeping shared labor and shared assets largely within the traditional rural social network of ones’ closest neighbors and family. Forty years of consistently improving living standards were also a factor. Peasants gained access to electricity, running water, education, health care, and a wide array of consumer goods.¹²    

The Disruption of Socialist Agriculture (1993 – 1997)

In the 1990s, agriculture and food security in the DPRK suffered a huge setback. From 1994 to 1997, North Korea was struck by successive natural disasters, severely damaging the country’s industrial facilities and power stations. All of this greatly limited food production capacity and triggered a general food crisis.¹³ The evaporation of imported energy resources was the key factor that turned a series of floods and droughts into famine. In the early 1990’s, the North Korean population was growing and largely urban, with a demand for energy and food consistent with other low-middle income countries. By 1993, on the eve of the crisis, the DPRK’s government had already lost the ability to import needed fossil fuels. This would prove a fatal problem, as North Korea’s agricultural system was uniquely energy intensive, with tractors, electric water pumps, and chemical fertilizers all seeing very high rates of utilization. Immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the DPRK’s oil imports from the former USSR had dropped from 410 metric tons in 1990 to about 100 metric tons the following year, and the North Korean government tried to transition to fuel self-sufficiency.

Already facing shortages, the DPRK’s chemical plants, electric irrigation pumps, and agricultural machinery all became motionless monuments to the nation’s prosperous past when natural disaster struck. A series of floods and droughts hit North Korea between 1995 and 1997, damaging farm land, irrigation systems, and power plants.¹⁴ During this period, the total volume of trade in the DPRK was around only 60% of what it was in 1985. In addition to the energy crisis, the lack of trade relationships made it harder for the North Korean government to compensate for its increasing inability to produce ag-tech inputs. There was nothing stopping the coming food crisis. When the DPRK’s annual total grain output plummeted from 9 million tons to less than 3 million tons between 1993 and 1997, a food production gap led to malnutrition rates that only emergency foreign assistance could mitigate. 

While natural and international factors certainly worsened the food crisis,North Korea’s specific policies, both economic and ecological, also played a role. Woon Keun Kim believed that the soil erosion caused during the flood was only worsened by the land reclamation campaign’s deforestation of some mountain areas; the excessive construction cost of water conservancy projects in some areas were also unsustainable financial burdens. Both Woon and Kim Jong Il agreed that excessive range of corn monoculture combined with insufficiently scientific fertilizer application hurt soil productivity.¹⁵ Grain and energy self-sufficiency, something that neighboring South Korea did and does not have, was a herculean task for North Korea in the 1990’s.

Aside from the original topographical difficulties, budgetary constraints have also been softened by decades of aid and debt forgiveness from the Socialist Camp. According to Soviet estimates, the total value of aid to the DPRK from the Soviet Union, China, and other people’s republics was roughly equal to 879 million rubles after the Korean War.¹⁶ In 1960, the Soviet Union canceled DPRK’s foreign debt totaling 760 million rubles, and the repayment of the remaining foreign debt was extended. Debt repayment would be later postponed three times, in 1971, 1976, and 1981. The Soviet Union also continued to give out preferential loans to the DPRK.¹² By 1991, the DPRK’s foreign debt to the Soviet Union had accumulated to 2.85 billion rubles. All of this made uneconomic investment in a highly energy intensive agricultural sector much more possible. The surplus value of more developed Socialist countries was in practice subsidizing North Korean agricultural development. Sometimes this transfer of social wealth was even more direct. In the immediate aftermath of the war, cattle, irrigation dams, meat processing facilities, timber plants, and tractor repair stations were just some of the direct aid that North Korea received from other Socialist nations.¹⁷ When the international socialist market collapsed, goods exchanged between the DPRK and Comecon countries at treaty prices now needed to be bought with hard currency at world market prices.¹⁸ After 1992, North Korean agriculture could only be sustained by the currency generated from domestic production.      

 North Korea may well have been institutionally unready to strictly budget for continued food self-sufficiency. The end of cheap energy imports did not make it any easier. Yet the collapse of Socialist bloc and the disastrous human costs of “shock therapy” that market reforms had caused in Eastern Europe was evidence enough for North Korean leadership that there was no room for perestroika style economic reforms, even as the nation entered its most severe post-war famine.¹⁹

Current Bottleneck of Socialist Agriculture in the DPRK (1998 to present)

For more than twenty years since the famine, the DPRK has fought to keep working towards grain self-sufficiency and food security. In 1998, the DPRK’s government began to make policy adjustments that encourage potato cultivation and organic fertilizer production, reducing the country’s dependence on corn cultivation and fertilizer, providing more calories with less energy intensive inputs.²⁰ Labor intensive measures were introduced on a new scale. In 2002, a mass public work project brought “shock brigades” down to the villages to standardize field sizes, reclaim land, and construct water ways.²¹ In 2014, Kim Jong Un again emphasized that the country’s basic line of collectivized, centrally planned rural development was unshaken. Following this line, national leadership was to strive for the development of an independent breeding system, more scientific fertilizer application,  double cropping, and a large-scale reforestation project in order to prevent floods in mountainous areas.²² The North Korean government resumed medium-term central planning in 2016, after two decades of interruption. Party-led rural renewal was supported by both official documents and fresh rounds of capital investment in infrastructure, however meagre.²³

Despite these adjustments, it is important to recognize that total grain self-sufficiency remains an impossible task. Grain production has grown by 57.55% from the low point in 1996 to 2020. The 2020 figure is still less than that of 1973, when the country had less arable land and 10 million less mouths to feed. North Korea has supplemented its domestic yields through a combination of bilateral aid, commercial imports, and multilateral assistance. In its 2020/2021 Season report, the FAO projected that domestic production and originally planned imports would be insufficient to provide complete year-round nutrition for the whole population.²⁴ At the 8th Workers’ Party of Korea Congress in 2021, Kim Jong Un reported that the implementation rate of the economic plan from 2016 to 2020 was not ideal. Specifically, many planned targets were not met in many areas, difficulties at home and abroad that hindered new efforts at socialist construction. He acknowledged that the quality of life in the countryside had become backwards.

 Kim’s report largely doubled down on the existing prescriptions: stronger party leadership, more realistic planning, stronger heavy industry support, a crack-down against anti-socialist behaviour, more construction materials for each county, and stricter grain procurement. All of these items could be a boon to North Korea’s food system, should they be realized. The external pressures on the country guarantee however that the present bottleneck continues. A 2013 FAO report opines that North Korea’s inability to import a sufficient amount of tractors, chemical fertilizer, or plastic tarps remains one of the key factors preventing returns to pre-crisis yield levels.²⁵ Since 2006, the United States, South Korea, and Japan have all increased sanctions against the DPRK. From 2016 to 2017, UN Security Council resolutions 2270, 2321 and 2371 explicitly banned the DPRK’s exports of mining, fishing, and machinery products.²⁶ This means that North Korea has been prevented from utilizing its current resources to raise the capital needed for more complete rural infrastructure investment, ag-tech production, or stop-gap commercial imports. Even if planning mechanisms and agricultural adjustments are effective, it remains as unrealistic as ever for North Korea to achieve food security under the present sanctions. The same nuclear weapons program that deters Western military interference continues to be the basis for devastating global sanctions.      

Lessons of North Korean Rural Development

 1.) Continued Advantages of Economic Planning

Rural North Korea’s past flourishing and present survival as a polity and a socialist project both have in part been accomplished thanks to the inherent advantages of economic planning. The socialist nations of 20th Century Europe, especially between 1960 and 1980, also experienced many of the same transformations that took place in the DPRK. Specifically, there was rapid urbanization, socialization of agricultural land, increased government investment, a reduced tax burden on farmers, and an allowance for private family plots.²⁷ Just as in North Korea, grain yields in these countries also soared. There was an average growth in total national grain yield of 66.16% in Warsaw Pact countries between 1960 and 1980, despite agricultural labor productivity being still well behind developed Capitalist countries.²⁸ Contemporary economists like M. L. Seth who then advocated for planning during this period were of course also aware that inefficiencies in collective farm management and shortages in industrial inputs still existed, but took improved yields and food security as evidence of sufficient administration countermeasures.²⁹ Even if one disagrees with this assessment, we ought to be equally nuanced in our judgement of centrally planned agriculture. The past flourishing of 20th Century socialist agriculture, whether Eastern European or Korean, should be understood as real and a typical phenomena that took place.

North Korea today, despite all of the sanctions and isolation, still has a far superior material standard of living than other countries at the same level of per capita income. According to a survey by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2013 and a survey by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2017, although North Korea’s economic development is slow, and the annual per capita GDP of the nation is only $640 USD, neither the rural or urban population is not presently experiencing famine. Between 2000 and 2020, FAO estimates indicate that the rate of child stunting decreased from 54.4% to 18.2%. Interestingly, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations also found that the nutritional conditions of the rural population are generally better than those urban populations that rely on state food distribution.³⁰ UNICEF found that the literacy rate of North Korean children has reached 95% while access to basic sanitation services and clean water respectively stood at 83.16% and 94.51%. All of these figures are relatively favorable when compared to Capitalist countries with similar levels of per capita income.

Physical Quality of Life In North Korea and Capitalist Countries at Similar Income Levels³¹

In Cereseto and Waitzkin’s 1986 study of World Bank data, it was found that planned economies in general have a better physical quality of life than Capitalist countries in the same income group. That is to say, at an equal level of development in productive capacity, a planned economy will ensure better access to things like education, health care, sanitary services, and nutrition. This is the typical pattern, and North Korea’s situation is another verification of this principle. Unlike in developing Capitalist countries where the social services of rural populations can be neglected by comprador governments even in times of growth, planning mechanisms and an integrated party-state draw attention and resources out of the urban areas.³³ The disconnect that has existed between national GDP growth and rural social development in countries like Equatorial Guinea or South Africa is not usually observed within a planned system.³⁴ For all its problems, North Korea has genuinely escaped from “growth without development,” and the above figures are a testament to that. On this point alone, no radical academic and organizer should be so absolute in any dismissal of rural development under planning.

2.) The Geographic Needs of “Socialism in One Country”

However favorable the material standard of living of North Korea is compared to nations with a similar level of income, this only demonstrates the progressive nature of the nation’s production relations. Its development of productive forces in absolute terms is another story. In its isolation, the nation has had very limited success developing its productive forces in the past 25 years. Seldom do advocates of socialism now attempt to compare the statistics of the two Koreas. The material living standards of South Koreans are now far superior by every major metric. Yet comparing the two Korea’s grain production numbers shows the fundamental causes of North Korea’s difficulties. In 2020, while North Korean gross cereal production(4.66 Million Tonnes) may be comparable to South Korea(4.95 Million Tonnes), the occurrence of stunting in South Korean children was less than 1/8th that of North Korean Rate. Trade has undeniably played a role here. At the same time, sufficient ag-tech inputs have also let South Korea produce roughly the same total amount of cereals using a significantly smaller area of cultivation, 796,000 vs. 1.34 Million hectares.³⁵

Would South Korea have been able to accomplish grain food security or efficient agricultural production without trade? Although South Korea does want more grain self-sufficiency, it would be impossible to imagine that South Korea could have reached the present situation without the grain imports, energy imports, or public revenue that export-oriented industry has afforded.³⁶ Neither Korea, under Socialism or Capitalism, could thrive without trade.

The present bottleneck of North Korean agriculture raises questions about the geographic requirements of replicating the Soviet Union’s “Socialism in One Country.” Even in Kim Jong Un’s most recent speeches, a very Soviet kind of strategy is articulated. National grain security is to be achieved by improving domestic cereal yields though the production of ag-tech inputs combined with strengthened Party leadership in economic management. This largely worked for the Soviet Union following the 1928 grain crisis. Yet, the spectacular growth in heavy industry, tractor stations, and agricultural yields that characterized the Soviet Union’s early Five-Year Plans, has not taken place in contemporary North Korea. Why not? Just like in China, one reason is likely that North Koreans have a relatively smaller amount of arable land per capita. Russia today has 9 times the per capita arable land of the DPRK. This limits North Korea’s food production capacity, as does its inability to fuel its heavy industry or petroleum powered agricultural equipment.³⁷

North Korea simply doesn’t have the Soviet Union’s vast fuel supplies. The growth North Korea achieved between 1954 and 1991 was only possible with trade and assistance from the other Socialist nations. This point should be acknowledged by future revolutionary groups working against similar geographic factors.

3.) Rural Development Under Planning’s Basic Trade-off

 In the absence of a revolutionary socialist camp, new revolutionary governments looking to implement planning in rural development must assess whether or not their country has the adequate geographic conditions to become self-sufficient. If a socialist countryside was to be built in the United States, an autarchic planned economy might bring both progressive production relations and the stable growth of productive forces. The quality, quantity, and equal availability of food could be guaranteed. For those found geographically lacking, a choice must be made between planning’s progressive production relations and a market economy’s potential to expand productive forces. This is the fundamental difference between the North Korean approach and that of China, Laos, or Vietnam. Under these three latter governments, effective rural development and real rising living standards for the peasantry have accompanied liberal economic policies. These countries have shown that the party-state apparatus can augment market behaviour and investment patterns such that the laboring classes’ standard of living consistently grows with that of new capitalist owners.

“Is it better for the peasantry to produce 1000 catty of rice through capitalist means or 500 catty through socialist means?” This was the question that Chinese political economists verbally and sometimes physically struggled over in the 1960s and 70s. In the absence of a revolutionary socialist camp, rural development under planning in Nepal or India today might mean choosing the latter course, i.e. stunted production modernization but more progressive distribution. Such a decision may return dividends in the long run. So long as the capitalist world market is still bound for crisis and collapse, then rural development under the Chinese or Vietnamese model has an expiration date. If material interests and class antagonisms are still bound to intensify, then any re-socialization of production and property ownership may find opposition in countries where the political position of “new strata” such as capitalistic farm owners and private food processors have become secure. The rural development path of North Korea could avoid such contradictions, but in the short term will remain bottle-necked so long as the current geopolitical situation continues.

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1. Joan Robinson: “Korean Miracle” Monthly Review, Volume 16, Issue 9, (1965); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, (Verso Books, 2018): 423, 533.
2. Woon-Keun Kim, “The Agricultural Situation of North Korea,” Korea Rural Economic Institute, 1998.
3. “Arable Land Per Per Capita,” Nation Master. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Agriculture/Arable-land/Hectares-per-capit.
4. Lao Tian, “The Legacy of the People’s Commune System,” Chengshi Lecture #1, People’s Food Sovereignty.
5. Kim Il Sung: Collected Works, Vol. 18. (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984): 178-184.
6. Textbook of Political Economy, Soviet Academy of Social Sciences, Economics Research Institute, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957): Chapter 35. Accessed March 12th, 2022: https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch35.htm.
7. Kim Il Sung: Collected Works, Vol. 18.(Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1984): 192.
8. Charles Armstrong: “The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea 1950-1960”, The Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, Volume 7 Issue 0, (2009).
9. Meredith Woo-Cumings: “The Political Ecology of Famine-North Korean’s Catastrophe and its lessons, ” ADB Institute Research Paper No.31, Asian Development Bank, (2002).
10. Woon-Keun Kim: “The Agricultural Situation of North Korea”, (Korean Economic Institute, 1998).
11. Meredith Woo-Cumings：”The Political Ecology of Famine – North Korea’s Catastrophe and its lessons,” ADB Institute Research Paper No.31,Asian Development Bank, (2002).
12. Masahiko Nakagawa: “Success and Failure of North Korean Development Strategy,” Discussion Paper #769, (Institute of Developing Economies, (2020).
13. Woon-Keun Kim: “The Agricultural Situation of North Korea”, (Korean Economic Institute, 1998); Meredith Woo-Cumings：”The Political Ecology of Famine – North Korea’s Catastrophe and Its Lessons,” ADB Institute Research Paper No.31, Asian Development Bank (2002).
14. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” (2013); Woon-Keun Kim：“The Agricultural Situation of North Korea,” Korea Rural Economic Institute, 1998.
15. Kim Jong Il, Selected Works, Vol. 14 (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Publishing House, 2014): 376-377.
16. Charles Armstrong：“The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea 1950-1960″, The Asia Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, Volume 7 Issue 0, (2009).
17. Ibid; Charles Armstrong：“The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea 1950-1960,The Asia Pacific Journal,Japan Focus, Volume 7 Issue 0,2009.
18. Jane Shapiro Zacek: “Soviet and Russian Relations with the Two Koreas”, International Journal of Korean Studies I, (Spring of 1997): 215-229.
19. Kim Jong Il：”Giving Priority to Socialism is Essential For Accomplishing Socialism,” Pyongyang: Foriegn Language Publishing House, 1995; ”On Preserving the Juche Character and National Character of Our Revolution,” Pyongyang: Foreign Language Press, 1997.
20. Kim Jong Il Collected Works, Volume 14, (Foreign Language Publishing House): 376-377.
21. Kim Jong Il Collected Works, Volume 15, (Foreign Language Publishing House): 312-329.
22. “Korea Today, Forest Restoration Makes Headway,” Pyongyang：Foreign Language Publishing House, 2020, Issue 12: 18; Kim Jong Un：”Let Us Bring About Innovations in Agricultural Production Under the Banner of the Socialist Rural Theses ,” Letter, Foreign Language Publishing House: 2014.
23. “Full Text of Kim Jong Un’s Speeches at the 7th Congress of the Workers Party of Korea,”Resources, (National Committee on North Korea, 2016). https://www.ncnk.org/resources/publications/KJU_Speeches_7th_Congress.pdf; Kim Jong Un’s Closing Speech at the 8th Congress of Workers Party of Korea, Video Recording, 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7TxHtHRFTs.
24. “Food Supply and Demand Outlook in 2020/21 – The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2021. SSN 2707-1723.
25. Crop and Food Security Assessment Mission to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013).
26. “Fact Sheet Compiling Certain Measures Imposed by Security Council. Resolutions,”United Nations Security Council, 2018.
27. J. Wilczynski, “The Economics of Socialism,”1977, Third Edition, George Allen & Unwin,p.114-125.
28. Ibid; Gale Johnson “Food and Agriculture of the Centrally Planned Economies,”Conference Paper,  National Council for Soviet and East European Research, 1982.
29. M. L. Seth, “The Theory and Practice of Economic Planning,”1969, New Delhi: S. Chand & Co, p.270-271.
30. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “ Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” FAOSTAT: Accessed March 7th, 2022. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/116.
31. Per capita GDP Numbers follow the 2019 UN estimates, life expectancy numbers come from the Worldometers’s both sex average figures, and all other metrics come from the most recent round of  UNICEF MICS Survey for each country, which varied between 2015 and 2020.
32. These twenty nations were the closest to the the DPRK in terms of per capita GDP, all between 500 and 900 USD:Burkina Faso, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, Yemen.
33. Ha Joon Chang: “Economics – A User’s Guide” Pelican Publishers,2014,pp.250-252; “Equatorial Guinea – African Economic Outlook,” Africa Development Bank,2012.
34. Immanuel Ness: “Southern Insurgency – The Coming of the Global Working Class,” (Pluto Press, 2016): 16-21; 43-45; 72-73.
35. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “ Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” FAOSTAT: Accessed March 7th, 2022: https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/116; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Republic of Korea,” FAOSTAT: Accessed March 7th, 2022, https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/117; Kang Yoon Seung, “S. Korea to Up Self-sufficiency of Grains, Cut Carbon Emissions at Farms,” Yonhap New Agency, September 16, 2021.
36. “Arable Land” World Bank Data. Accessed March 9th 2022. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.HA.PC?end=2018&locations=RU-KP&start=2000.
37. Lin Zili and You Lin, “Critiquing the Gang of Four’s Critique of “Productive Forces Only.” People’s Press, (1978):104-114.