North Korea marked its annual Tree-planting Day on Tuesday mobilizing workers across the country to plant saplings in depleted forests as part of a long-running reforestation campaign.

But while leader Kim Jong Un has made the project a priority, the planting campaigns have long come into conflict with the practice of using hillside areas in the countryside for private farms known as “sotoji.”

These unofficial, but largely tolerated, private fields have for decades provided poorer North Koreans with a significant part of their income, even as they contribute to widespread deforestation.

And as reports of severe food shortagesin the