North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Maarten Jongsma: Growing potatoes, and partnerships, in North Korea

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Maarten Jongsma, a senior researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, joins the podcast to discuss his years of collaboration with North Korean agricultural scientists and efforts to help improve potato cultivation in the DPRK. He shares his recollections from his multiple visits to North Korea between 2004 and 2012, describing the country’s push to […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast, available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private-feed. Hello, listeners, and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko Sweetslute, and today I'm recording this episode on Sunday, the 26th of October 2025 via Streamyard, and I'm joined by a first-time guest, and that is Dr. Martin Yongsma, who is senior researcher at Wagen University, where his research focuses on how plants or plant products interact with other organisms from insects to humans.

He once headed a project to make North Korean potatoes resistant to the disease, if I've pronounced that correctly. We're here to talk about that experience in giving agricultural knowledge to the DPRK. Thank you for joining us and welcome on the show, Dr. Yongsma. Great to be here. Actually, I've had a little interaction with South Korean agencies. So that's always quite interesting. If you had to illustrate North Korea's turn towards potatoes in one field scene that you personally witnessed,

what would we see or smell and what did you realize in that moment? Well, I guess the level of mechanization is very possible. really much more limited than what I'm used to. I mean, the fields looked okay, I've taken well care of, but a lot of manual labor. Right, right. And that's true, I think, in across North Korean agriculture broadly. But we know that, you know, traditionally, Koreans didn't eat a lot of potatoes.

North Koreans now do. So how do you see this sort of shift from grains and from maize towards potatoes? How would you characterize that? Yeah, it's been a major effort by the North Koreans to improve their food situation, which makes sense also, because in the North especially, the climate is such that it's much, it's quite well suited for potato growing. And they were growing a lot of maize there, but actually potatoes, to some extent, are more nutritious and just a good complement with the grains that. were being grown there. And it's been a real effort that they are proud of that they managed to at least double, double it to, I believe, 15% of the diet at some point.

Right. And we'll get into a bit more detail of Matt, but I just wanted to set the scene a little bit. In your diary, which you wrote from your trip in August 2009, you described walking around in Pyongyang at night with no street lighting and with trams groaning through the dark. Do you believe that that would compare to how farmers experience after hours work and transport in the countryside with not much electricity and just doing things in the dark? Yeah, for sure. It's a completely different scene. But I guess when you're used to it, it's okay. So, yeah, in general, I found people to be quite cheerful and interested. And in general, maybe that goes beyond your question, but the first time I came, I was in a hotel and I was surprised to see a lot of books and literature about focusing really still on the Americans.

So the awareness there was very different from what I was expecting to be the major thing. It's not about South Koreans, but it's very focused still on. on the American right right yep that's something that I've definitely seen a lot of as well yeah so let's get into a bit of detail with the potatoes there so today and because of that shift towards potatoes how how central are potatoes to DPRK food security today and when do you understand that transformation to happen well they they thought it was very important important and we have been working with them from between 2004 and 2012 and after that the collaboration ended due to the defection of one of the

students that was in wagening but since then actually the amount of the yield of potato if i'm to believe the f ao statistics really decreased a lot again so it joined it returned to a really low level again so so they made a huge effort to try to potato is a propagated material so you have seed tubers and those are just the same the same plant as the mother plant and the problem with that is that once that you get viruses in there the yield will go down dramatically and this is something they they really managed to have a huge program on to to overcome that issue but apparently it's sort of collapsed because the yields went back really down low after that and I have no direct communication about

these about what happened but yeah obviously that the whole plan they had which was really important for food security etc collapsed you know when the DPRK government decided to really focus a lot of energy on potatoes was that around 2004 when when your organization became involved yeah already a little before that. So in 2001 there was already a visit of a colleague to North Korea and actually to the institute in Pyongyang and there we saw the efforts that were made and the to make them virus free but there was still this phytostra or late blight problem so it's a fungal disease that will attack the plants as soon as the rains start and then they quickly

die unless you spray pesticide or unless you have a variety then to is resistant to this disease and that's he communicated that i believe in 2001 and then uh and then they they decided or they would send people to wageninger in 2004 and that was the start of the real collaboration right i had it sounds like it might have been part of the result or the aftermath of the mid-1990s famine that the north yeah for sure decided the late 1990s let's focus on potatoes and that's what led to the series of steps that that you mentioned 2001 and then 2004 and so on and they were already doing well but they realized they needed to have this genetic improvement of their of their varieties and they wanted to test the Dutch varieties but also come into contact with our molecular research or genetic research right to find the resistance genes etc you've already hinted at one thing that makes potatoes a good fit for for DPRK conditions, that it grows better in the climate. Is there anything else, anything nutritionally,

that makes potatoes something good for North Korea compared to rice or maize? Yeah, for sure. It's like a vegetable in the sense that it's a fresh product and it has all the vitamins, et cetera. It also has starch, obviously, but at the same time, it's a vegetable. So it's a much more,

broadly nutritious than crops like maize or rice that are that have lost most of that unless you would sprout them or something but that's not how people eat them so so that's the narrowness of the diet has been a nutritional problem and i also witnessed that the UN food program was active to to find supplementation of that because they obviously weren't doing a a good job there. Yeah, now, you're both in North Korea and in South Korea, rice has a special place in the, in the minds of Koreans, you know, it's the traditional staple and it's a particular kind of rice, a stickier kind of rice than rice grown in India, for example, or in Southeast Asia.

So do you think it's been difficult for people in North Korea to switch from expecting rice to eating more potatoes. Did you notice anything or did you hear anything about the the psychological or the sociological difficulty of that? No, not too much. I think there were they already do have some tradition but yeah, sure. So I actually I don't recall that. But there has been in the statistics it went from 5% to 15% over 10 to 20 years. period. So it's not the dominant food still, but obviously it's a important supplementation. Something else from your diary. You write about trucks running on wood-burning stoves rather than

petrol or gasoline and also traveling 250 kilometers without seeing a single petrol station with fuel priced at $12 to $15 per 15 kilograms. It was an unusual metric. So how did that that energy scarcity shape what it was possible in the field of agriculture in North Korea when you were traveling around in 2009. Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today for access to the full episode. Head to NKNews.org slash join for more information. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the private podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NKNews website at NKNews.org slash private-feed.