Thousands of hectares of fields in Kangnyong and Ongjin areas in South Hwanghae Province are now sufficiently supplied with the fresh water from Lake Kangnyong.

The areas had long suffered from a shortage of water.

In the past several projects had been carried out there, but the problem of irrigation water had not been fully solved.

In order to solve the problem of irrigation water and thereby lay a foundation for stable and sustained agricultural production there, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un took a measure of desalinating Lake Kangnyong to use its water for irrigation at the Fifth Plenary Meeting of the Seventh Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea in December 2019 and wisely led the project.

The project was really gigantic. It required the reinforcement of major embankments hundreds of metres long and construction of main canals scores of kilometres long and over ten pumping stations for irrigating more than 6 000 hectares of fields.

The project started, but significant progress was not made in it due to the enormous workload and a lack of manpower and equipment.

At the Seventh Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the WPK in 2023 Kim Jong Un took a measure of mobilizing powerful construction forces to the projects for reinforcing and building waterways, desalinating Lake Kangnyong and building sea dykes as they were to be pushed forward in real earnest.

True to his plan, the builders finished the projects in a short span of time and the working people in South Hwanghae Province newly built main canals and branch waterways.

The completion of the projects changed the scenery of the area—a vast stretch of reclaimed tidal flats, waterways crisscrossing the fields and clear Lake Kangnyong behind them.

The desalination of Lake Kangnyong brought about a change in the farming in the areas around it.

As the fresh water from the lake flowed into the thousands of hectares of fields in the Kangnyong and Ongjin areas, many rain-dependent fields turned into fully-irrigated ones and rice seedlings could be transplanted in the right time in the reclaimed tidal flats where rice-transplanting was restricted until rains came.

The farmers in the areas are expecting a promising harvest this year.

It is expected that the Ryongmot Farm which was among the farms in Kangnyong County suffering a lot from water scarcity will record a high per-hectare yield. Meanwhile, the town farm of the county has increased per-hectare yields of wheat and barley by more than 1.2 times.

The Jangsong Farm in Ongjin County which has a large area of reclaimed tideland has reaped the highest wheat and barley harvests among the farms in the county this year. And all the workteams of the farm are now striving to become high-yielding units.

Kim Hyok Chol