In a fascinating, short interview with North Korean expert Mitsuhiro Mimura, 38 North‘s Jeff Baron covers territory that sparked a lot of thoughts. In this segment, I couldn’t help but reflect on how this explanation of a change in farming behavior would resonate with a libertarian:
JB: So you’re saying the North Koreans are giving individual workers and farmers incentives to produce more, and that that’s a new thing. How does that work in practice? Is there really any noticeable impact, changes in the way the workers do their work?
MM: Absolutely. Let’s go back to the collective farm, which is now letting workers keep what they grow beyond their quota. Now, there’s no change in the fact that the State owns the rice paddy land, not the farmer. But now, the collective gives a particular paddy to a particular farmer, not just to work for this year, but year after year. In effect, as long as the farmer is managing the land well, he or she can count on getting the same land to work for the next production year too.
And yes, you can see the impact of that.
Traditionally—and traditional farm methods are still used in North Korea, because of the shortages of agricultural chemicals and machinery—farmers in Japan and Korea went to the mountains after harvest to bring back leaves, to spread on the fields as fertilizer.
But that’s a lot of work. And up until a few years ago I never saw farmers on collectives in the North make that effort. They might or might not be working the same land the next year. And they didn’t get any benefit from extra production from the collective.
Now, they know they’ll be working the same land. And that they’ll benefit from the extra production.
In the last few years, when I’m in North Korea after harvest time, it’s common to see those collective farmers going off to the mountains to bring back leaves for their fields.
For a libertarian, giving ownership to the farmer induces the farmer to use sustainable practices out of common sense – in theory. In practice, we may instead see slash & burn techniques, mostly because the libertarian makes false assumptions about the inclination of the farmer to follow legal restrictions, such as invading tropical forest which may yield quick profits, rather than working soil that requires more patience.
In the North Korean setting, ironically, the generally iron hand of the government results in better behavior by the farmer. He (or her) may not own the land, but knowing it’s effectively his apparently leads to a better behavior. But will happen if the government then arbitrarily takes it away?
