October 16 is World Food Day.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of World Food Day and the 80th founding anniversary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The World Food Day was designated to play up the importance of the food problem to all countries, regions and people around the world and, at the same time, to highlight the urgency for solving the worldwide food problem and intensify international discussion on the ways to address the challenges including elimination of poverty and hunger through increased food production.

Despite this effort, food crisis still remains as a global issue, not as a limited number of countries and regions.

At present, conflicts and disagreement among different countries and regions of the world and extreme weather greatly disrupt the efforts to put land and water in good use for food production and conserve biodiversity, and this comes as a major factor causing the food crisis.

For this reason, the FAO has set the theme of World Food Day for this year as “Hand and Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future” with the aim of emphasizing its ideal and cooperative spirit and calls on all countries and regions to deepen collaboration and cooperation to fight hunger worldwide and build a better future of food and agriculture.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea takes proactive measures to increase agricultural productivity so as to solve the food problem.

The country has taken steps to definitely change the structure of its agricultural production into rice and wheat cultivation and promotes state assistance and public cooperation for agricultural sector. Under its concern farming methods based on advanced science and technology are adopted and generalized and high-performance farm machines according to farming processes are produced and provided to farms.

It ensures that all agricultural units regard it a fait accompli that the country will be affected by disastrous abnormal weather such as high temperature and torrential rain and take adequate preventive measures, while securing water resources and actively applying water-saving farming methods. This year alone, irrigation structures, waterways and other irrigation facilities have been built or repaired throughout the country as part of the effort to lay the foundations for the stable development of agricultural production. As a result, projects to irrigate more than 160 000 hectares of rice fields have been completed and over 3 300 hectares of non-paddy fields have been turned into paddy fields.

Also, the country has built and renovated modern vegetable greenhouses and greenhouse farms in different regions every year, thus producing more tasty and nutritious vegetables to contribute to improving the people’s diet.

Kim Hyon Ung