Kim Jong Un, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, has set forth a new five-year plan for the DPRK’s economic development at the Ninth Congress of the WPK.
The primary task of the socialist economic construction at the present stage is to cement the achievements made during the eighth term of the Party Central Committee, lay a foundation of development for the stable and steady growth of the country’s economy and substantially improve the people’s living standards. To this end, the period of new five-year plan should be a phase of stabilization and consolidation, a phase of gradual and qualitative development, and this must be set as the general goal, the principle of the work of the ninth-term Party Central Committee, he said at the meeting.
As already known, the WPK set it as the general orientation of the five-year plan for the national economic development in the eighth term of its Central Committee to lay solid foundations for reenergizing the overall national economy and improving the people’s standard of living by concentrating efforts on the main links in the whole chain of economic development. In a nutshell, its economic strategy for the past five years was the one for readjustment and reinforcement.
In its wake, the main thrust of the new five-year plan is to properly coordinate the following two aspects in the coming five years―consolidating the economic foundations and forces built in the past five years in a qualitative way and further developing them.
Accordingly, the DPRK plans to qualitatively consolidate the foundations for the production of the key industries such as the metallurgical, chemical, electric power, coal and machine-building industries during the period of the new five-year plan to guarantee the growth of the overall economy and to ensure sustainable development of the natural resources exploitation, mining industry, forestry and rail transport sectors. The Party Congress also called on the light industry sector to focus on the quality improvement and development of new products and lay a new groundwork for the light industry.
The agricultural sector intends to keep intensifying the work to change the grain production structure with main emphasis put on rice, wheat and barley farming, and expand the wheat-processing capacity and push ahead with the seed revolution, scientific farming, tideland farming, double cropping and land improvement to provide an important guarantee for the increased grain production. On the other hand, the country aims to steadily develop livestock farming, further improve the irrigation system, attain the goal of tideland reclamation and promote the land realignment so as to continue to cement the material and technical foundations of agriculture and, at the same time, further scale up the proportion of mechanized farm work by increasing the production of farm machinery.
The future development of the construction sector is particularly expected. It is reported that the construction sector, as it did in the past five years, will vigorously propel the projects for transforming the capital city of Pyongyang into a magnificent city with an appearance as a world-class city. It also plans to execute the work to transform the provincial capitals across the country year by year.
In addition, the DPRK attempts to develop various levers of economic development in a diversified and comprehensive way, including IT, foreign trade, tourism, land management, ecological environment protection and improvement of urban management.
At the congress Kim Jong Un also indicated the tasks and ways for further speeding up the regional development, the rural construction during the period of new five-year plan to transform the regions and countryside in a fresh way every year and bring about greater improvement in the material and cultured life of the people across the country.
When the new five-year plan set forth by Kim Jong Un is realized, more epochal progress will be made in the economic development of the DPRK and the improvement of the people’s standard of living.