Opinion

Grand construction projects are now under way in the DPRK to perfect its irrigation system.

As ancestors said, “afforestation and water conservation are the foundation of farming”. Therefore, an age-old desire of Korean peasants was to be masters of water, as well as land.

Under the wise guidance of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il, agricultural irrigation was basically completed already in the 1960s and gravity-fed waterways were built even at hard times afterwards.

However, the irrigation system of the country was damaged to a considerable extent due to the failure to keep the readjustment and reinforcement of it in step.

The restoration of the irrigation system arose as a priority especially in view of the climatic features of Korea which is dry in spring and rainy in summer and in order to protect crops from annually repeated drought and flooding and from the influence of disastrous abnormal weather growing more serious year after year and to establish a scientific grain production system.

Under such circumstances, the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea was held in December 2021, which marked an occasion of epochal significance in solving the irrigation problem vital to farming and in laying the foundation for agricultural production free from crop failure.

At the plenary meeting WPK General Secretary Kim Jong Un set forth the programme for a rural revolution in the new era, whose main aim is to model all the rural communities of the country on the Juche idea and make them well off, unveiled a plan to readjust and reinforce the irrigation system of the country and further perfect it and advanced the goal of irrigation construction to be achieved by 2025.

An irrigation project is the construction work requiring a great deal of labour, materials and funds.

The sixth and seventh plenary meetings of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK clearly defined the phased goals guaranteeing the successful completion of the country's irrigation system in a few years.

This signalled the start of the grand nature-remaking project for readjusting, reinforcing and perfecting the irrigation system and the irrigation project for this year which was set as the top priority task of the whole Party and the entire country was launched all at a time in all fields of the country.

A powerful construction force of the Korean People’s Army was committed to the irrigation project, a long-term irrigation design was developed, looking forward to 50 or 100 years ahead, and materials and equipment needed for irrigation construction such as cement, steel, pumps, electric motors, transformers and valves were produced by workers in different parts of the country.

As a result, a stride was made in agricultural irrigation to ensure the stable and sustainable development of agriculture.

In the first half of this year, the irrigation construction goals for this year, which were set forth at the Seventh Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK, were attained in the main, including the building of the irrigation system for 200 000-odd hectares of paddy and non-paddy fields, the dredging of small and medium-sized rivers and the permanent sea dyke construction project.

In particular, the irrigation system for over 60 000 hectares of dry fields was renovated, with the main emphasis on the areas severely affected by drought, and thereby a firm guarantee has been provided for producing a stable yield by overcoming the freak of nature.

The desalination project of Lagoon Kangnyong was completed for supplying fresh water to thousands of hectares of water-deficient areas in Kangnyong and Ongjin counties and so was the Chongchon River-Phyongnam irrigation waterway for supplying life-giving water to Yoltusamcholli Plain.

The Workers' Party of Korea’s determination to bring in rich harvest year after year, unaffected by the vagaries of the weather, is making a new history of irrigation on this land.

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