South Korea is looking into the whereabouts of a North Korean defector couple amid speculation that they may have voluntarily returned to North Korea via China, Seoul’s unification ministry said Monday.

A local cable TV channel reported Sunday that the 30-something defector couple could not be reached after they left for China in mid-October.

Kyaw Lwin, the state minister, confirmed the plans, and said there was a total of 45,000 acres of “ownerless Bengali land”.

The machines will be able to harvest about 14,400 acres according to official calculations contained in the plans. It is unclear what will become of the remaining crop, but officials told Reuters they would try to harvest all the paddy, recruiting additional labor to harvest manually if necessary.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) deputy Asia director Phil Robertson, said the government should at least guarantee that the rice would be used for humanitarian support and not for profit.

Those who do decide to cross back into Myanmar will first be received at one of two centers, according to government plans reviewed by Reuters, before mostly being relocated to model villages.

International donors, who have fed and cared for more than 120,000 mostly Rohingya “internally displaced persons” (IDPs) in supposedly temporary camps in Rakhine since violence in 2012, have told Myanmar that they will not support more camps, according to aid workers and diplomats.

The hamlets where Rohingya farmers lived were “not systematic”, and so should be rebuilt in smaller settlements of 1,000 households set out in straight rows to enable development, said Soe Aung, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement.

“In some villages there are three houses here, four houses over there. For example, there’s no road for fire engines when fire burns the villages,” Soe Aung said.