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DPRK Directs Efforts to Land Management

Korean Central News Agency of DPRK via Korea News Service (KNS)

    Pyongyang, June 16 (KCNA) -- Great efforts have been channeled into the land management in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Kim Kwang Ju, a section chief of the Central Forestry Designing and Technology Institute under the Ministry of Land and Environment Conservation, was interviewed by KCNA on the occasion of the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought which falls on June 17.
    He said:
    Today the content to combat desertification comprises not only the dry areas but also all the lands degenerated by forest destruction.
    Land management has been raised as a pressing issue in the DPRK, a mountainous country which has limited arable land, no more than 17 percent of the territory, and thick population.
    In particular, the climate changes by abnormal high temperature phenomenon on the globe have brought about natural disasters such as landslide, flood, submersion and drought to the DPRK, too. For the recent ten-odd years, the country has had more than 1.5 million hectares of forest and not a small acreage of cultivated lands destructed or degenerated.
    The DPRK government has formulated policies to manage land well and to make an effective use of it. And the sustained land management is guaranteed in the DPRK by various laws including the land law, environment protection law, land designing law, forest law and water resources law.
    It has set up months of general mobilization for land management every spring and autumn to arouse all the people in the land management campaign such as afforestation, river improvement and land rezoning.
    As a result, over 130,000 hectares of forest have been created and hundreds of kilometers of rivers and streams improved every year.
    The land rezoning projects have been undertaken according to annual plans as a state affair, with the result that some 293,700 hectares of paddy and non-paddy fields have been turned into large standardized fields and the arable land expanded over the last 7 years.
    For a few years following the completion of the Kaechon-Lake Thaesong Waterway Project, gravity-fed channels extending 280-odd kilometers have been built, creating a safer environment for agricultural production.
    Along with this, the work for putting the management and utilization of land resources on a scientific and IT basis has been undertaken.
    Regular work for analyzing soil of each plot and surveying land erosion is carried on throughout the country once with an interval of 4-5 years.
    The DPRK, a member nation of the Convention to Combat Desertification, will strengthen the international cooperation in the efforts to realize the sustained land management, Kim Kwang Ju stressed.