Months after North Korea unveiled the country's largest-ever greenhouse farm, analysts told Radio Free Asia that satellite imagery shows less than half of the farm is operational, likely due to power shortages.
According to state media, the country's leader Kim Jong Un personally guided the construction of the Sinuiju Greenhouse Farm Complex. It has been touted as a way to rejuvenate Wihwa, Mado and Kumdong islands in the Yalu River, near the border with China, which were leveled by flooding in 2024.
At the farm complex' dedication in February, Kim acknowledged the floods as being the heaviest on record, but said the project overcame nature to create "from which our people will benefit for all ages."
At a gargantuan 450 hectares (1.7 square miles), the Farm Complex is roughly the size of 625 soccer fields, and authorities claim it can produce vegetables eight months out of the year. But thermal infrared imagery from NASA's Landsat-8 satellite suggests that only 44% of the total complex was registering temperatures above the surrounding average, Bruce Songhak Chung, a researcher at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy, told RFA.
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