North Koreans hospitalised after Kim Jong-un imposes 'impossible' poo quota
'There’s no other country in the world where people fight over human faeces' one North Korean woman complained
NORTH Koreans have been reduced to stealing each others' turds after Kim Jong-un demanded an impossibly high quota of poo from his people.
The Kim regime compels citizens to horde faeces every January, hoping to boost crop yields despite a chronic national shortage of fertiliser.
And this year the quota is “impossibly high” – forcing North Koreans to steal or buy turds from each other, or face punishment.
Each adult must contribute 500kg, and each schoolkid 200kg – way over the 145kg the average person poops in a year.
And now the burden is causing fights, with North Koreans coming to blows trying to defend their poos from desperate neighbours.
One fight in Unsan County, to the north of the capital, left two men hospitalised, a local source told Radio Free Asia (RFA).
He said: “A factory worker was trying to steal faeces from an outhouse next to the other guy’s home.
“They were fighting each other with axes and shovels and were seriously injured.”
In another incident, a brawl erupted after a schoolboy was caught raiding the public toilets.
“The head of the neighborhood watch unit flipped the student’s cart over and shouted at him,” the source said.
“Then the kid’s mother came out and argued with the watch unit leader, asking if the poop belonged to him.
“Things escalated and a full-blown fight broke out.”
Another source, worried about how she would fill her quota, said that women were expected to find as much as a full metric tonne of poo.
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That’s because women are classified as “housewives” – despite most having to work to supplement their husbands’ unliveable government wages.
She told RFA: “The communal toilets in the neighborhood are locked and inaccessible, so where can I find enough faeces to produce compost?
“We have to steal pig waste piled up next to private pig pens or human faeces from private toilets, which leads to frequent fights.”
She added: “The authorities can’t provide us food but force us to provide compost.
“There’s no other country in the world where people fight over human faeces. The authorities are responsible for this.”
But fights aren’t the only public health hazard caused by the push for poo.
Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK), said intestinal worms were rife.
He said: “Since the end of the Cold War, North Korea has no longer benefited from subsidised imports or gifts from former fraternal communist countries.
“Fertiliser was one of the first victims of this development, with devastating effects for agriculture in North Korea.
“The regime has tried to make up for this by collecting human faeces to be used as fertiliser.
“The public health effects have been devastating, in particular the prevalence of intestinal worms due to this practice.
“The practice of stealing human faeces from neighbours to reach the assigned quotas is a grotesque symbol of North Korea's profound economic failure.”
The punishment for those who fall short is unclear, but the evidence of past years paints a horrific picture.
A source in Ryanggang Province, in the north of the country, told RFA in 2024 that those who failed could be publicly reproached or face a “severe punishment”.
“You will be punished by being sent to a labour training camp,” he said.