N. Korea mobilizes university students for economic rebuilding

By Kim Hyun
SEOUL, Jan. 16 (Yonhap) -- University students are vigorously helping out at
farms and plants to increase production, Pyongyang's media said Friday, as the
global economic downturn casts a shadow on the North's goal to be able to feed
its people.
North Korea vowed to "solve food problems by our own efforts" and rebuild the
nation's decrepit industry infrastructure in its New Year joint editorial.
Weighed down by the tanking global economy, however, the North's economy appears
headed for minus growth this year, analysts say.
"Students of the DPRK are doing their bit in seething realities during the
vacation in response to the call of the joint New Year editorial," the Korean
Central News Agency (KCNA) said. DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of
Korea, the North's official name.
The report said students from 10 universities in Pyongyang, including the
nation's top Kim Il Sung University and the Kim Chaek University of Technology,
helped workers at the Pyongyang Thermal Power Complex, the nation's first thermal
energy plant.
Some of the students worked at farm cooperatives, the report said.
"They carried a vast amount of manure to fields together with peasants," it
said, pointing out that the editorials call for meeting this year's grain
production target "with the extraordinary determination to solve the food
problem by the Korean people's efforts in any circumstances to cope with the
world-wide food crisis."
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il continued his industrial tours to silk yarn and
gum factories in Pyongyang, the KCNA said late Thursday.
North Korea's gross domestic product shrank for the second consecutive year in
2007 to 20.7 trillion won (US$15.2 billion), according to the latest report by
South Korea's central bank. It was even lower than the North's output in 1990,
valued at 24.1 trillion won.
It is assumed that the North's economy recovered slightly last year with improved
grain harvests, but its 2009 outlook is not optimistic, analysts say. Chinese
demand for minerals, a major North Korean export, has nosedived and prices have
fallen.
"Backlogs of minerals are said to be accumulating because the Chinese economy is
contracting and demand is falling," Shin Chang-sik, an official at the Bank of
Korea, said. "Given the circumstances, the North Korean economy is expected to
achieve zero growth at best."
Pyongyang recently restored a postwar industrial campaign to mobilize citizens.
The Chollima Movement, named after a mythical winged horse, was promulgated in
1956 as doctrine by Kim Il-sung, the current leader's father and nation's
founder, to rebuild the country from the debris of the Korean War.
Customary rice and fertilizer aid from the Seoul government was suspended after
the conservative Lee Myung-bak government took office last February.
"As the input from the outside world for production is decreasing, North Korea
seems to have been pushed into a closed form of economic reconstruction that
depends on mobilization of domestic labor," the state-run Korea Institute for
National Unification in Seoul said in a recent report.
hkim@yna.co.kr
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