North Korean founding leader Kim Il Sung once famously promised that every citizen would soon be able to eat meat (that is, pork) soup daily. However, three decades of attempts to create a state-controlled system of pig farming ended in failure. 

Instead, it was a rare, officially sanctioned turn to the private market that brought Kim’s dream closer to reality.

International sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic have since disrupted all sectors of the North Korean economy in recent years, pig farming included. But the experiment in private farming showed what markets can produce when the state gets out of the