A nationwide drive to perfect the irrigation system is gaining momentum in the DPRK.

The country completed most of its irrigation system in rural areas as early as the 1960s, and later built gravity-fed waterways.

However, this success was not followed by proper maintenance and reinforcement, resulting in considerable damage of the irrigation system across the country.

Dry and rainy seasons persist in every spring and summer in the country. Worse still, drought and heavy flood repeat every year. It was therefore imperative to radically improve the irrigation system before anything else to protect crops from the worsening disastrous abnormal weather and establish a scientific grain production system.

Under such circumstances, the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea was held in December 2021, which marked an occasion of epochal significance in solving the irrigation problem vital to farming and laying the foundation for agricultural production free from crop failure.

At the plenary meeting the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un , unveiling a rural revolution programme in the new era, advanced a plan to readjust and reinforce the irrigation system of the country and further perfect it and the goal of irrigation construction to be achieved by 2025.

And in the policy speech at the Seventh Session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly, he said that the whole country should join efforts to carry out the project for rebuilding irrigation facilities without fail in two or three years by restoring or reinforcing what has been destroyed or is old, and by installing more where necessary.

The sixth, seventh and ninth plenary meetings of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK advanced the phased goals for guaranteeing the successful completion of the country’s irrigation system in a few years, and tasks and methods to this end.

This signalled the start of the grand nature-remaking project for readjusting, reinforcing and perfecting the irrigation system, and the nationwide irrigation campaign was launched full steam simultaneously across the country as the top priority task for the whole Party and the entire nation.

A powerful construction force of the Korean People’s Army was committed to the irrigation project, a long-term irrigation design was worked out, looking forward to 50 or 100 years ahead, and materials and equipment needed for irrigation construction such as cement, steel, pumps, electric motors, transformers and valves were produced in different parts of the country.

As a result, a signal progress was made in the irrigation construction to ensure the stable and sustainable development of agriculture.

An irrigation system covering hundreds of thousands of hectares was set up, and the desalination of Lake Kangnyong to irrigate thousands of hectares of fields of water scarcity in South Hwanghae Province’s Kangnyong and Ongjin counties, the Chongchon River-Phyongnam waterway to irrigate Yoltusamcholli Plain and the Hwangju Kindung waterway, the sixth of its kind in the country’s history of large-scale gravity-fed waterway construction, were brought to completion.

Consequently, a well-knit system has been built to irrigate all fields ranging from the deep mountainous farm villages in the northern part of the country to the reclaimed tidelands along the West Sea of Korea.

The new history of irrigation unfolding in the country according to the rural revolution programme in the new era indicates the WPK’s determination to reap a rich harvest year after year, unaffected by any unfavourable weather conditions.

Jong Hwa Sun