January 31 this year marks the 80th founding anniversary of the Union of Agricultural Workers of Korea (UAWK).

After Korea was liberated from the Japanese imperialists’ military rule on August 15, 1945, the UAWK was founded on January 31, 1946 as an organization for rallying the broad masses of peasants in a unified way. The union owes its founding to the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung who advanced an original theory on building a revolutionary peasants organization and created the brilliant revolutionary traditions of the peasant movement in the country during the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.

The UAWK powerfully aroused the peasant masses to the victory in the agrarian reform after liberation, led them to the struggle for increased agricultural production and assistance to the front in the period of the Fatherland Liberation War (June 25, 1950-July 27, 1953) and contributed to the completion of the country’s agricultural cooperativization after the war.

True to the Workers’ Party of Korea’s intention of modelling all the rural communities across the country on the Juche idea, the UAWK set it as its major task to train its members to be performers and masters of the rural revolution, and creators and enjoyers of modern civilization.

The central, provincial, city and county organizations of the UAWK actively conduct mass movements to create and generalize new model units in the agricultural sector so as to encourage their members to work in a responsible, assiduous and meticulous manner and make a positive contribution to turning all the rural villages throughout the country into rich and cultured ideal socialist ones in the near future.

Every year they organize vigorous socialist emulation drives among farms, as well as competitions in livestock farming and vegetable, mushroom and fruit cultivation and other sectors to raise a strong wind of boosting agricultural production and encourage the agricultural workers to prepare themselves as masters of scientific farming and developers of agricultural science and technology.

They also dynamically wage a campaign of overtaking and learning from others and swapping experiences, with the result that many high-yielding units and farmers have been produced every year while new farm machines and implements have been invented and introduced to contribute to the rural technical revolution.

Today the UAWK is successfully fulfilling its mission and role as the vanguard of the rural revolution in the struggle to attain the goal of socialist rural construction in the new era set forth by the WPK.

Yon Ok