A terrible drought has hit the North Korea, the worst since 2001, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). In North Pyongan province alone, hundreds of thousands of people - farmers and workers, but also party officials and office workers - work side by side with soldiers every day to irrigate fields and rice paddies.
The KCNA has released some photos taken on a farm near Pyongyang, in which farmers are seen carrying water in buckets and plastic bottles and pouring it on the dried land. Nature seems to have taken the trouble to deny the leader Kim Jong-un, who in his speech at the beginning of the year had indicated agriculture as the primary objective of economic planningpe had urged businesses and workers to increase agricultural production. The Rodong Sinmun, the official press organ of the Workers' Party of Korea, declared that "overcoming the drought is not only a practical necessity, but above all a duty, performed to achieve the noblest purposes of the party".
The same newspaper, in hailing an exceptional fishing trip in the West Sea, called the supreme leader "great mother" instead of "great father" of the country. "It was a miracle" he wrote "not due to science and technique, physical strength or a coincidence of history, but to the love that the great mother Kim Jong-un has for her people". The unusual name, according to some foreign commentators, fulfills the function, in a moment marked by a serious natural disaster, of emphasizing Kim's role as protector of the nation.
