Mick Hartley

Another item from North Korea's Rodong Sinmun today – Campaign for Supplying Manure to Farms Brisk in DPRK.

Officials and working people in South Hwanghae Province in the DPRK are displaying greater enthusiasm for rendering assistance to the rural communities from the outset of the new year, true to the resolutions of the 9th Plenary Meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Officials and working people of institutions, enterprises and factories in the province sent tens of thousands of tons of manure to farms on Tuesday alone.

Officials and employees of provincial organs and young people in the province made great efforts to produce a lot of city manure in a short span of time.

"City manure"? It's human excrement they're talking about. That's what they're making great efforts to produce.

This comes up every year. I posted last January on the shit stealing, as people raid each other's toilets to meet the impossible quotas set by the authorities. 

Also:

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.