North Korea's hottest commodity: human excrement

[Eldritch]

Fertilizer shortage forces North Korea to sell human feces



Shops selling human excrement began operating in North Korea this year, as acute shortages of fertilizer in the sanctions-wracked country put a price on feces, an analyst said Tuesday.

Aid groups have said human waste has long been used on domestic crops in the impoverished communist state, but there is now a trade in the readily available commodity, a North Korea analyst told a seminar at a South Korean university.

“Each household used to use human excrement as fertilizer. But because it’s hard to keep up with the amount, ‘human manure’ shops showed up at markets,” Kim Young-Soo, a professor at Seoul’s Sogang University, told the seminar.

The lack of fertilizer has become acute since South Korea stopped annual shipments of rice and fertilizer to North Korea in 2008, amid worsening relations.

Kim also said other Products making their way on to a limited must-have list for North Koreans this year included skinny jeans, after a ban on fashionable trousers was lifted.

North Korean women have previously been told to wear only skirts or traditional attire in public places, but the interdiction on trousers was lifted this year, Kim said.

“Skinny jeans are now popular and are changing the fashion style of women in Pyongyang,” he said, citing sources in the hermit state.

Other popular items include secretly imported South Korean products like instant noodles and adult movies, he said.

North Korea is a tightly controlled society with foreign-made films or dramas heavily censored or banned because of their decadent “imperialist” culture.

Defectors say South Korea’s pop culture is nevertheless popular in the isolated country. Videotapes and CDs of South Korean films, music or TV soap operas enter mainly via neighbouring northeast China.

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/12...#ixzz19XbD2JVg

Maybe I'll do my business in one of these for a week, and then send it to North Korea as a development aid donation:



Seriously though, as much as I pity the north Koreans suffering under terrible tyranny, I feel a (very) fleeting moment of regret thinking about the inevitable time when they'll be left at the mercy of the abovementioned decadent imperialist mass consumer culture.

[Vasconcelos]

Oh shit lol!

pun intended

[Treffie]

I'm surprised that there's enough food to go around to manufacture it

[Eldritch]

I'm surprised that there's enough food to go around to manufacture it

Actually even people who don't eat have to poo now and then.

Even patients in who've been in coma for years and fed intravenously still produce it.

[lei.talk]

Originally Posted by lei.talk

Phosphorus
It's an essential, if under-appreciated component of our daily lives, and a key link in the global food-chain.

And it's running out.

Large amounts of this resource are lost...down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces.

which is one reason why, on our farm, we recycle both.

my familiarity with out-houses
was re-enforced by discovering the rodale press edition
of Farmers of Forty Centuries, Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
in a library as a child.

my farm had no public utilities
for decades
and this method was necessary.

the techniques were improved with this book:

[The Ripper]

May be we should start selling the produce of our summer cottage.

[exceeder]

I'm surprised that there's enough food to go around to manufacture it

Amen to that! What with the common occurence of famine and all