USDA INTELLIGENCE

The Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) is the main intelligence division within the United States Department of Agriculture. The FAS´ International Production Assessment Division is, in turn, in charge of making Commodity Intelligence Report (CIR) for different nations around the world.

Commodity Intelligence Report (CIR)

CIRs are mainly used to conduct global market analysis on food production and economic outlooks. In the case of North Korea, their Seasonal Crop Outlook is of particular interest to the intelligence community for two reasons:

• It provides a hint on what North Korea might do in terms of provocations (when in danger of experiencing a famine, they tend to become more provocative)
• Their conscripts mainly do crop collection (so when troops are conducting harvest work, they are not able to perform significant exercises or adopt a higher readiness level)

Their report is short, concise, well-researched, highly reliable, and impartial.

REPORT

END OF REPORT

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