calendar>>March 5. 2010 Juch 99
Great Leadership for Realizing Long-cherished Desire of Peasants
Pyongyang, March 5 (KCNA) -- President Kim Il Sung promulgated "Law on Agrarian Reform in North Korea" on March 5 Juche 35 (1946) to realize the Korean peasants' centuries-old desire.

When Korea was liberated from the Japanese imperialists' rule, the land issue was of great importance in the colonial agricultural country where the peasants were making up an overwhelming majority of the population.

Without solving the issue, it could neither eliminate the economic foothold of the reactionary forces in the countryside nor ensure the social democratic development.

That is why the President gave priority to successfully carrying out the agrarian reform in the implementation of socio-economical reforms.

He often went to rural areas including Taedong County, South Phyongan Province, to acquaint himself with their actual conditions and need of peasants for land and find out a solution to the land issue.

He analyzed the complicated feudal land ownership and confirmed objects of land confiscation, methods of land confiscation and distribution and ways of abolishing the tenant system for good before promulgating the historic law.

He, with it as the main principle of the agrarian reform to make toiling peasants true owners of land, advanced a policy of effecting the agrarian reform on the principle of confiscation and distribution without compensation and conversion of the confiscated land into the ownership of peasants, not into the state property.

Therefore the land reform was concluded successfully throughout the country in a matter of some 20 days. Over one million hectares of land were confiscated from Japanese imperialists, pro-Japanese elements, traitors to the nation and landlords without compensation and distributed free of charge to over 720,000 households of peasants with no or less land.

The land reform propelled the development of overall economic sectors in the country.

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