Kim tasks key regime figures with North's regional development scheme

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday included key ruling party and regime figures in a newly formed committee to oversee regional economic development projects outside of Pyongyang...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un addresses the 10th session of the 14th Supreme People's Assembly in Pyongyang in this file photo dated Jan. 15. [NEWS1]

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday included key ruling party and regime figures in a newly formed committee to oversee regional economic development projects outside of Pyongyang.

The committee will be led by Jo Yong-won, a secretary of the Central Committee of North Korea's ruling Workers' Party and a close confidant of Kim, and Pak Jong-gun, vice premier of North Korea and a member of the party's politburo, reported the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the ruling party.

The committee will construct factories in 20 counties yearly for the next 10 years to raise North Koreans' living standards. This is part of a local development plan the regime put forward earlier this year as the country faces severe food shortages.

In his official address to the politburo last week, Kim alluded to this shortage and spoke harshly of officials’ lukewarm attitude to the plan.

“The committee should provide guarantees of materials and facilities and measures to construct the factories, and ensure local raw material bases are sufficient to ensure successful production at the factories,” the Rodong Sinmun reported Tuesday.

Experts in Seoul said the Kim regime appeared to be ordering all hands on deck on the plan with hopes of boosting regional economies and rescuing the country from severe food shortages.

“It seems to be part of a strategy to no longer neglect the gap in development between rural areas and cities,” said Lim Eul-chul, professor of North Korean studies at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University.

Alluding to Kim's inclusion of key politburo members in the committee, Lim said that the committee’s formation also signals the regime’s “resolve to improve the livelihoods of the North Korean people to a level unforeseen before.”

The committee members will likely be held accountable for any failure in implementing the plan.

“North Korea's economic difficulties are caused by its socialist planned economic system, so unless there is a fundamental change in the system, it will be difficult to achieve any results in a short period,” said Oh Gyeong-seob, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.

"In the end, the key members of the committee are likely to bear the responsibility for policy failures."

North Korea's manufacturing base, including light industry, collapsed with the end of the international socialist bloc in the late 1980s and the country's own "Arduous March" in the 1990s, when North Koreans suffered mass starvation.

Its industrial infrastructure, including railways, roads and electricity, has long been inadequate, as have its raw material supply chains.

“It is unclear if the country will have enough finances or materials to support the plan to build additional factories outside of Pyongyang, given that the regime already has other plans, such as the five-year economic development plan presented at the Eighth Party Congress,” a Unification Ministry official told the JoongAng Ilbo recently.

BY ESTHER CHUNG, CHUNG YEONG-GYO [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]