Lee & Gund Foundation Supports Agglobe International With a Financial Donation to aid Farmers in North Korea

In an effort to help North Korean farmers get beyond the famine that struck their country in the mid-1990s, our LEE & GUND Foundation has made a donation to Agglobe International to purchase and plant cotton and trees at four cooperative farms in North and South Hwanghae Province. In the first of its kind, Agglobe, a Minnesota-based 501c3, has secured a contract with the government of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, to help rehabilitate and develop these four cooperative farms situated between Pyongyang and Kaesong.

A portion of our donation went to purchase 8 metric tons of cottonseed for the 2007 spring planting. For example, at the Ryun Pyong-Ri cooperative farm which has 645 families (3,000 people), farmers plant 400 hectares of food crops and 180 hectares of cotton. As a cash crop, they are able to sell cotton to the government and eventually for export, which has enabled them to purchase other critically needed supplies such as medicine, clothes and blankets.

A second portion of our donation went to purchase several species of tree saplings, such as acacia, fast growing poplar, dates and persimmon and apple trees for the spring, and pine and spruce trees for the Fall. The hills surrounding the North Korean countryside have been largely deforested due to the severe energy crisis that hit the nation in the early 1990s. The people, without any other source of energy to cook food or heat their homes, were forced to deforest the surrounding landscape to survive. Our donation will go towards plant fruit and leguminous trees that help revitalize the soil.