After glorifying the year 2021, the first year in implementing the five-year plan advanced by the Eighth Congress of the WPK, as a year of triumph to be etched in history, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea greeted the New Year 2022, filled with confidence in a fresh victory and optimism. Then, which direction will the country take?
State Development and Improvement of
the People’s Living Standards
Analysts comment that in the New Year, the DPRK will direct its greater efforts to ensuring the state’s development and improving the people’s livelihood.
What attracts attention is the conclusion General Secretary Kim Jong Un made at the Fourth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth WPK Central Committee last year.
Kim Jong Un said that the main task facing the WPK and the Korean people this year was to provide a sure guarantee for the implementation of the five-year plan and bring about a remarkable change in the state’s development and the people’s standard of living so as to record a noteworthy page in the history of the country. The economic sector, the main front of socialist construction, will focus an all-out effort on putting the country’s economy on the growth orbit and providing stabilized and improved living to the people by reenergizing production and pushing ahead with the readjustment and reinforcement.
To this end, Kim Jong Un put forward major tasks to be attained by the country this year.
Major Political Tasks
The conclusion advanced in detail the major political tasks for the sector of key industries to carry out this year.
According to it, the metallurgical industrial sector should technologically refine the Korean-style iron-producing method, produce iron and steel as scheduled by supplying fuel and raw materials in time and, at the same time, push ahead with the expansion of capacity and modernization.
The chemical industrial sector should give full play to the newly-created fertilizer production capacity and boost the production of materials for light and pharmaceutical industries by reenergizing major chemical factories, while accelerating the projects for establishing a new structure of the chemical industry.
The power industrial sector should strive to raise the electric-power production to a high level while satisfactorily meeting the immediate demand for electric power. And it should reduce the loss of power in transmission, step up the building of new power stations and increase the capacity of generating electricity by diverse natural energy sources.
The coal industrial sector should give precedence to prospecting and continue waging a high-speed tunnelling campaign to find more coalfields. And it should increase coal production by introducing advanced mining methods and machines and pay attention to helping the bituminous coal mines increase the production.
The railway transport sector should enhance the safety of the railways, accelerate its modernization and establish the state’s unified system of controlling the overall transport so as to develop the country’s transport work by stages.
The machine-building industrial sector should responsibly provide the equipment needed for implementing the readjustment and reinforcement plans of several economic sectors and units, and boost the production of vehicles, electric machines and construction machines and improve their quality.
This year the DPRK will give a strong push to the effort to improve the people’s living standards.
The conclusion advanced important tasks for making a radical progress in solving the food, clothing and housing problems for the people.
To this end, it stressed that the entire WPK and the whole country should concentrate efforts on farming and give manpower and material support to the rural communities, and the agricultural sector should increase grain production by doing all the farm work in a sci-tech way and positively use farming machines as the area to grow wheat and barley are to be expanded.
In the economic work, the capital construction sector should be prioritized and a new revolution in construction should be made for fundamentally changing the living environment of the people so as to continue to usher in the heyday of the capital city construction including the building of 10 000 flats planned for 2022 and open up an era when the local areas change.
The light industrial sector should set it as an important task to reenergize the production of consumer goods and push ahead with it. And it should put the foodstuff processing technology on a higher scientific basis.
This year, too, the country will continue to direct great efforts to education.
Saying that the supply of school uniforms and things to all the students across the country at the state expense is a consistent policy of the WPK and the state, the General Secretary set forth a task for supplying all the students with quality uniforms and bags of new types without exception and took an important measure of the WPK Central Committee for implementing it.
He stressed the need for the fishing industrial sector to conduct work for catching more fish, do fish breeding and other kinds of aquiculture well and increase marine resources in an effective way.
Also mentioned in the conclusion were tasks for the sectors of mining industry, forestry, IT industry, land administration, city management, scientific research, education, public health, the art and literature and other fields in giving impetus to the comprehensive development of socialist construction.
The major political tasks advanced by the DPRK gives a glimpse of the definite structure of development which the country aspires after now.