Rural revival in North Korea

Previously malnourished communities are now producing their own trees and growing chestnut, peaches, pears and other fruits.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 had a devastating impact on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Subsidies to the nation ceased, agricultural output fell and hunger and extreme poverty spread across the countryside. In desperation, many people began to open up 'sloping lands' – most of the country is mountainous – to grow food. The result was frequently disastrous: deforestation, combined with heavy rains and inappropriate farming practices, led to landslides and severe erosion.

In 2004, the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) and the Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection launched a project to restore degraded land in Suan County. In 2007, SDC and the Ministry invited the World Agroforestry Centre to provide training and technical advice.

The project began with just three user groups, each with 10 members and 10 ha of land. By early 2011, there were 87 groups in eight counties. "Previously malnourished communities are now producing their own trees and growing chestnut, peaches, pears and other fruits," says Jianchu Xu, the World Agroforestry Centre's coordinator for China. "This has had a dramatic impact on people's lives."

Jianchu believes the success of the project owes much to the willingness of the authorities to acknowledge the user groups' rights to use the land, harvest and sell their crops and plan their activities. This is a highly unusual state of affairs in a country where the State has traditionally exercised rigorous control over every aspect of people's lives.

Local entrepreneurship, combined with active research, has encouraged the spread of agroforestry, with different systems chosen to suit the prevailing conditions.

Innovations include double cropping of annual food crops with strips of high-value timber, medicinal plants and fruit trees. The World Agroforestry Centre will continue to provide advice to DPR Korea and intends to recruit local PhD students to develop land-use planning and landscape health-monitoring systems.