Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin

cooperative farm, Chun insisted—not a model farm such as the famous (and, to the Western ear, confusingly similar-sounding) Chongsan-ri, where the country’s agricultural policies had been incubated. 16 Indeed, three visits by the peripatetic leader were not, relatively speaking, very many.
    Model farm or not, Chonsam-ri had a prosperous look to it. The previous year, Chun said, the farm had produced 4,200 tons of crops including 3,600 tons of rice. The average share of each family was six tons of grain, which could be sold to the state, and cash in the amount of 3,000
won
($1,754 at the official exchange rate). That would have made the Chonsam-ri farmers slightly better off than average wage earners in the cities and towns. “During the past, the young people preferred to go to the city to work,” the farm official said, “but now young people from the city are coming to the countryside because the living standards of cooperative farmers have improved.”
    Farmers shared in the cooperative’s income according to a formula setting norms for what would be considered a day’s work in a particular task. Hand transplanting of rice seedlings is backbreaking work, and there were not enough rice-planting machines in operation in North Korea yet to make the old way obsolete. Bending to plant one hundred seedlings was considered a day’s work. A farmer got due credit, in the form of added fractional “days worked,” for overfulfilling the quota. On the other hand, plowing was mechanized and a day’s work was considered planting one hectare (two and a half acres). Farmers shared the grain crop, and cash earned by the cooperative from sales of vegetables and fruit, according to each family’s total days worked, officials said. But first, the cooperative took a portion out for the common fund to finance the next year’s farming and development projects. The farm had to buy fertilizer and tractor fuel from the state and pay the state for water supply and tractor rental.
    The work on the farm remained hard and long. The farmers followed the old East Asian custom of taking a day of rest only every ten days. In the winter, though, there was a day off once a week, and each family could takefifteen days’ leave each year for a vacation at a state-provided beach or mountain resort. “Our farmers,” Chun said, “are receiving great benevolence from the state.”
    Children inherited household effects from their deceased parents, Chun told me, and could stay on in the family homes if they wished. The typical family kept savings of about 10,000
won
($5,850 at the official exchange rate) in a state bank in the name of the head of the household. By custom another family member could use the money. Money in a savings account drew interest of about 4 percent a year. In the cooperative’s early days, Chun said, farmers had borrowed money from the bank, but later they had found it unnecessary to do so. The farmers did not have much need for their savings, aside from financing weddings and the like, Chun said, because “thanks to the solicitude of our Great Leader, the state provides the goods needed for our farmers’ life. Even raincoats are supplied for work at very cheap prices.”
    I knew that outsiders’ reports of North Korea’s economic shambles, even if exaggerated compared with the real situation in 1979, had their basis in genuine difficulties. Drought had affected harvests for several years. And, of course, the country had failed to repay its foreign trade debts. But officials’ talk during my visit was upbeat. Rains in that spring of 1979 had filled the reservoirs, they said. They predicted a bountiful harvest. And they claimed the country would be able to pay off its foreign debts by 1984, the end of the current seven-year economic plan.
    Obviously there had been a great deal of construction already—I took a trip by car on a recently completed and nearly empty multi-lane high-way across a hundred miles of mountainous