Tag: forests

North Korea News Broadcaster Criticizes Performance of Tree Nurseries

| October 6, 2015

It looks like some forestry personnel will be joining the Vice Minister Forestry who was executed earlier this year:

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On August 26, 2015, Korean Central Television (KCTV) aired a program entitled, Let’s Go Forward in Patriotism and Strength in the Forest Restoration Battle. The broadcast criticized several Forest Management Centers, including one in North Hwanghae Province’s Songnim. “They set up sun shades carelessly and then do not even water saplings properly. As a result saplings have become withered and yellow,” the program alleged.

The broadcast went on to a scathing critique of the tree nursery’s poor management: “The spraying equipment also does not properly work […] No more than 30% of the trees are alive […] The soil is overgrown with weeds […] One of the trees still has not sprouted.”

It also condemned the management of the Kangdong County tree nursery. “Because they do not properly conduct fertilizer management and also do not follow water guarantee measures, the saplings turn yellow and wither away. In the vegetable gardens there is so much seaweed that it is difficult to tell whether they are fields of saplings or meadows.”

“The fact that saplings can not grow properly is not due to unfavorable climate conditions but the defeatist and ‘non-owner’ work attitudes of the Forest Management Center workers and tree nursery work groups, who half-heartedly do their work and quit,” the broadcast added.  [North Korea Econ Watch]

You can read more at the link.

Seoul to Fund North Korean Forestry Experts to Train in Germany

| September 1, 2015

I like this type of engagement with North Korea where reforesting the environment is beneficial to both sides, however Seoul should not have agreed to pay for their studies in Germany.  Instead they should have offered them to train in South Korea.  If the Kim regime can afford nuclear weapons and ICBMs, they can afford to send their own scholars to school in Germany.  By the way I guess this guy won’t be going to training in Germany:

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Seoul plans to provide funding for North Korean forestry specialists to study in Germany, a U.S. news report said Saturday, in its latest effort to restore deforested mountains in the North.

Under the plan, South Korea will help around 30 North Korean experts study in Germany by providing US$70,000, according to the Voice of America (VOA), which cited the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

The specialists will visit Germany in four batches between September and November. Germany, with forests covering one-third of its area, has one of the world’s leading forestry industries. [Korea Times]