North Korean Economy Watch

UPDATE (2011-6-23): Today the Nautilus Institute sent out more interesting resources on the state of the DPRK’s forests.  Check them out below:

“Forest and Other Biomass Production in the DPRK: Current Situation and Recent Trends as Indicated by Remote Sensing Data”
Power Point Presentation by  Seung-Ho Lee (June 2006)

“Unbearable Legacies: The Politics of Environmental Degradation in North Korea”
Peter Hayes, August 30, 2009

ORIGINAL POST (2011-6-17):

Pictured above (Google Earth): A North Korean propaganda slogan on a mountain-side urging “Let’s plant more trees!”

This should be nothing new to regular readers of this site, but according to a recent article by Yonhap:

Deforestation in North Korea is taking place at a rapid pace as people cut down trees for fuel and turn forest into farmland, a report by a state think tank here said Friday.

An average of 127,000 hectares of forest in North Korea have been destroyed on average every year for the past two decades, the Korea Forest Research Institute (KFRI) said in the report based on data by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

I have not been able to locate the report on the KFRI web page.  If any readers are able to locate it, please send it to me.

An earlier report found that in two adjacent biosphere reserves across the border of China and North Korea, over one half of primary forest landscapes have been deteriorated by exploitive uses, including seed harvesting and systematic logging.

You can read a number of previous posts on similar topics here: Ministry of Forestry, Forestry, and Lumber.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 17th, 2011 at 11:44 am and is filed under Agriculture, Forestry, Lumber, UN Food and Agriculture Organization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.