Mick Hartley

Only in North Korea.

A near-theft of compost painstakingly produced by a side-business work team under the logistics bureau of North Korea’s Ninth Corps headquarters has prompted workers to organize nightly guard rotations at the storage site, Daily NK has learned.

According to a Daily NK source in North Hamgyong province yesterday, someone arrived at the compost storage site near the Ninth Corps headquarters late on the night of Feb. 21, during the party conference, pulling a cart in an apparent attempt to load and carry away compost undetected. The individual or individuals were caught in the act.

A single cart can carry more than one ton of compost, so the potential loss could have been significant. Fortunately, those attempting the theft fled the scene as soon as they were spotted, leaving the compost untouched.

In the wake of the incident, workers from the logistics bureau’s side-business team have been taking turns standing guard at the compost storage site from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.

The headquarters logistics bureau runs side-business farming operations using its own workers to secure food supplies for the unit. To meet the fertilizer needs of that farming, the bureau assigns a dedicated team of around five to seven people to compost production.

The compost that nearly went missing was produced intensively by the side-business team from June through November of last year, with the total quantity amounting to several dozen tons.

We’re talking here of human compost: that is, human excrement. So the idea of a dedicated team tasked with producing compost does conjure up some unwelcome images.

They don’t do it all themselves, though….

“The side-business workers dedicated to compost production spent even the hottest days of last summer going from outhouse to outhouse with buckets strapped to their backs to collect human waste, and scraping ash from waste pits to make the compost,” the source said. “The compost they produce is of such high quality that even when mixed with other ash it passes inspection with ease.”

What a job.

The problem, the source explained, is that word has spread that the Ninth Corps headquarters logistics bureau side-business team has been stockpiling high-quality compost, and that has made it a prime target for theft among the broader population, particularly given the annual “compost battle” that kicks off each year at this time.

As I’ve noted before, the use of human excrement as compost is considered a likely factor in the prevalence of intestinal parasitic worms in the North Korean population.

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.