Mick Hartley

From the Daily NK:

As usual, North Korea is pushing its people to produce manure in the early days of the new year. 

A source in North Hamgyong Province told Daily NK on Friday that the authorities in Hoeryong ordered factories, enterprises and neighborhood watch units in the city to supply “300 kilograms of manure” per person as part of the “first campaign of the year.” 

According to the source, North Korea’s government issued a general mobilization order to each region late last year that 1) set the period of the first campaign of the new year and 2) called for the production of manure.

North Korea began last year’s manure struggle campaign from Jan. 4, but this year, manure production efforts started two days earlier, on Jan. 2.

Well yes, but where is this manure coming from? Local farms? Unfortunately not: there would be nowhere near enough to go round. The manure is in fact coming from their own backsides. This is human excrement we're talking about. 

In that light the article takes on a rather different tone:

North Korea has long imported fertilizer from China as domestically produced fertilizer is insufficient in both quantity and quality.

However, the country has experienced trouble importing fertilizer since it closed the national borders in the wake of COVID-19.

The authorities have, in turn, annually increased how much manure North Koreans must produce.

In fact, in Hoeryong, local residents were told to produce 150 kilograms of manure per household in 2021, 200 kilograms in 2022 and 300 kilograms this year. Meanwhile, students were told to produce 200 kilograms per person – 50 kilograms more than last year. Not to be left out, workers at factories and enterprises were told to produce 500 kilograms of manure per person.

A report from last year:

Competition for human feces has once again become cutthroat in North Korea, with mass public brawls breaking out as citizens begin the annual ritual of trying to fill unrealistic quotas to make fertilizer for the farming season.

In impoverished North Korea, farmland is fertilized using human waste, and the government tasks every household with yearly collection quotas.

RFA reported in January 2019 that households were struggling to meet an impossible quota amounting to 100 kilograms (220 pounds) per able-bodied citizen per day.

One source at that time told RFA the quota was intentionally unreasonable because the true purpose of the quota was to force the citizens to pay fines and bribes for failure to meet targets.

The quota is slightly more reasonable in 2022, as each citizen has until March to collect 300 kilograms of manure—human waste mixed with soil—per person, but the quota still means people must dip into their reserves, or find deposits elsewhere.

Those who don’t want to pay fines are fighting over night soil at public toilets and stealing it from each other. But individual fisticuffs are now giving way to group conflicts.

In the northeastern city of Chongjin, whole neighborhoods are mobilizing against each other, a resident who requested anonymity for security reasons told RFA’s Korean Service.

“On the 25^th, several residents from Marum village in Sunam district had a dispute with the people of nearby Sinhyang village as the Marumers were trying to collect human feces from a communal toilet located within Sinhyang,” the source said.

The Shit Wars.

This is not simply a matter of aesthetics: we avoid our own excrement for very good health reasons. There was the case of the soldier who escaped North Korea in November 2017 by running across the demilitarised zone. Badly wounded, he was rushed to hospital, where his intestines were found to be full of parasitic worms. The surgeon responsible said that he'd never seen anything like it before outside of textbooks. Other doctors have also described removing various types of worms and parasites from North Korean defectors. This, it's generally believed, is a direct result of using human excrement as fertiliser.