North Korean students mobilized to farm school land as rations dry up

North Korean students have barely settled into the new school year before being pulled out of class to expand school farmland plots, with parents in South Pyongan province voicing sharp frustration over an education system that increasingly prioritizes labor over learning.

A Daily NK source in South Pyongan province reported Thursday that students at schools in Kaechon have been mobilized every day after school since mid-March to clear land around existing school-run farming plots, known as bueopji (supplementary farmland attached to work units, used to produce food outside the state distribution system).

The work involves clearing shrubs and removing rocks from the surrounding land. Tasks are divided by age: younger students in elementary school and the first and second years of middle school handle tidying work around the plots, while third-year middle school students and high schoolers take on tilling.

The mobilization reflects the deep penetration of North Korea’s juche-rooted “self-reliance” policy into the education sector. Under the policy, each institution is expected to resolve its own financial and material needs without state support. Schools have long shifted the costs of facility repairs and educational supplies onto students and their families. Now, according to the source, schools are also mobilizing students to expand farmland as a way to address chronic food shortages among teaching staff.

With state rations effectively cut off for school employees, school administrative offices have turned to farming their own plots to provide teachers with supplementary food. The source said that expanding the size of those plots is directly tied to that need. Students, in effect, have become the labor force behind efforts to keep teachers fed.

Parents in Kaechon are growing increasingly vocal in their criticism. The source relayed the comments of one parent who said they could no longer tell whether their child was going to school to study or to work, adding sarcastically that at least the schools were teaching one thing well: labor.

Not all reactions have been confrontational. Some parents have offered a resigned acceptance, acknowledging that the school has little choice if it wants to put food on the table for its teachers.

But the majority, according to the source, are angry that the collapse of the state distribution system is a burden now being passed down to children. With schools consumed by the need to farm their own food under the self-reliance mandate, students’ core purpose of learning has been steadily pushed aside.

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