Mick Hartley

From the Daily NK:

North Korean neighborhood watch unit leaders have given households their yearly quotas for various scrap materials they are supposed to collect for the government.

Families have been given heavy quotas once again this year, eliciting sighs and lamentations from many North Koreans.

A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK recently that the yearly quotas had been handed down during meetings of neighborhood watch units at cities and counties throughout the province, including Chongjin and Hoeryong.

“People at these meetings all had grievances to share,” the source reported.

And what are these quotas, typically?

According to the source, one neighborhood watch unit in Chongjin provided the following quotas to each household in a meeting on the evening of Jan. 14: 40 kilograms of scrap metal, 10 kilograms of scrap paper, 5 kilograms of scrap rubber, 2 kilograms of oil crops, and three 25-kilogram sacks of dried night soil.

Dried night soil? That’s dried human excrement. How do they dry it? Presumably by spreading it out in the sun in the back garden. Who knows?

Three 25-kilogram sacks: that’s a lot of shit. There have been cases in the past of excrement being stolen by those unable to fulfil the quota. Only in North Korea.

It was used as fertiliser – and, judging from this, still is. Which is why North Koreans get intestinal worms.

The case of the soldier who escaped in November 2017 by running across the demilitarised zone is instructive here. 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.