On March 5, 1946, the Law on Agrarian Reform was adopted in Korea.

The great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung saw the agrarian reform as a primary task for carrying out democratic reforms after the country’s liberation.

A correct solution to the land problem was a prerequisite for abolishing the feudal relations of production that had fettered the country’s social development, for freeing the peasant masses from age-old backwardness and poverty, and for building a new, democratic Korea.

For this reason, the enforcement of the agrarian reform came as a particularly important issue for Korea, once a colonial agrarian country in which peasants held the overwhelming majority of its population.

Kim Il Sung made painstaking efforts to fulfil the peasants’ centuries-old desire for land.

He visited rural villages to inquire into their actual conditions. While chatting with peasants, he came to know the numbers of households in the villages including those of tenants, the acreage of the landlords’ farmland and the numbers of peasants tilling their own land.

On the basis of such inquiry, he worked out the principles and ways for carrying out the agrarian reform in keeping with actual conditions in the rural communities of the country and completed every article of the draft law on agrarian reform.

Then he promulgated the Law on Agrarian Reform on the aforesaid day.

He put forward the slogan “Land to the tillers!” and set it as the basic principle for the land reform to make the peasants the masters of land and specified the detailed direction and ways to that end.

The enforcement of the agrarian reform made it possible to liquidate the feudal land ownership and relations of exploitation which were deeply rooted in the country’s rural communities and find the most scientific solution to the problem of peasants and agriculture in the stage of the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution.

The vitality of the reform was fully demonstrated, as it ensured the development of the country’s agriculture and the improvement of the peasants’ living standards.

As a result, the grain output rapidly increased as compared to the pre-liberation period, and many peasants across the country donated a large amount of grain to the country.

The promulgation of the land reform law after Korea’s liberation was a historic event that laid out a solid foundation for successfully solving the issue of peasants and agriculture in the country and opening up a broad avenue for the development of the socialist agriculture.

Kang Jin Song