JUST when you thought North Korea couldn’t get any weirder, they do this.

The infamous Hermit Kingdom has launched “labour tours” for tourists. Images of the bizarre holiday package show western tourists planting rice and carrying out agricultural work in fields.

A tourism website launched by the country’s National Tourism Administration, DPR Korea Tour, describes the experience as “interesting” and says they are growing in popularity.

“Tourists are immersed in different labour life — manual rice-planting, weeding and fruit picking at the co-op farms or orchards in the country,” it says.

“Through the tours they can get an understanding of the agricultural policy and farming culture of the country and experience the diligent, cheerful profiles of the local people’s labour activities.”

But putting aside the fact that it is just plain strange, the tour is raising eyebrows because the secretive state is known for its systemic human rights abuses, which includes deadly slave labour camps for prisoners — as horrifically highlighted earlier this year when 22-year-old college student Otto Warmbier died on his return to the US, after 17 months in captivity in the totalitarian country.

But it isn’t just foreigners or prisoners that endure hard labour. The government systematically uses forced labour from ordinary citizens to control its people and sustain its economy.

According to a report from Human Rights Watch, a significant majority of North Koreans must perform unpaid labour at some point in their lives.

Former North Korean students who left the country told Human Rights Watch that their schools forced them to work for free on farms twice a year, for one month at a time, during ploughing and seeding time, and again at harvest time.

And all North Korean families have to send one family member for at least two hours per day, six days a week, to support local government construction or public beautification projects, like building structures, fixing roads, collecting raw materials like crushed stone, or cleaning public areas.

North Korea is also one of the few nations in the world that has not joined the International Labour Organisation which means they are denied freedom of association and the right to organise and collectively bargain.

However, like much of North Korea’s tourism industry, it is unlikely that holiday-makers will see any of the brutal working conditions residents actually face under the dictatorship when they visit the farms or orchards on state-organised visits.

Professor Gareth Shaw, who lectures on tourism at University of Exeter, told The Mirrorthat this type of tour would be spurred on by a rise in “volunteer tourism”.

“The kind of tourists [who take trips like this] tends to be a mix of retired people and younger people who are interested for moral reasons in volunteering.”

But while volunteering sounds like a nice thing to do, there are ethical questions raised by volunteering to help such a repressive regime.

“I guess you’d reconcile it by saying the regime is different from the people, so the ordinary people are suffering and if I can help them, that would reconcile the ethical side of it,” Dr Shaw told The Mirror.

“That’s the only way you could ethically reconcile it, I think. Because you wouldn’t want to help the man who runs the country, but you would feel sorry for the people that are suffering.”

Even so, experts believe tourists should question their desire — no matter what it is — to visit the totalitarian country.

Professor John Blaxland, director of Australian National University’s (ANU) Southeast Asia Institute and head of the university’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre previously told news.com.au, after the death of Otto Warmbier, that Australians should “seriously think” about travelling to North Korea. He said that as a foreigner, you should expect “everything you say or do to be monitored” — as well as actually understand why they do that and why we need to take that monitoring very seriously.

“[North Korea] tightly controls who gets to go into the country and tightly controls where they can go. They devote considerable resources — technological and human — to monitor you. It is really quite an Orwellian surveillance state where there are a lot of priorities placed on monitoring foreigners,” he told news.com.au.

“It is because of a deep-set conspiratorial mindset that is very much an echo of their experience in the Korean War, and earlier wars, where they were pummelled and where they suffered really severe hardship.

“That rhetoric is maintained because it is convenient for the North Korean regime. To hold that regime together, you need to instil and maintain that instillation of fear — [fear] of the outside and of the unknown.

“You want to seriously think about why you’re going and what you want to do.”

The Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Travel (DFAT) also warns Australians to reconsider their travel to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Foreign visitors have been subject to “arbitrary arrest and long-term detention” it cautions. “Foreigners may be arrested, detained or expelled for activities that would not be considered crimes in Australia, including unsanctioned religious and political activities, unauthorised travel, or unwarranted interaction with local nationals.”