Archive for October, 2017

DPRK resolves debt with Poland

Wednesday, October 25th, 2017

According to Yonhap:

North Korea cleared off its debt to Poland in 2012 after the European country signed a deal with the North to write off 61 percent of the debt the previous year, Voice of America reported Thursday.

The Polish Treasury Department told VOA’s Korean Service that Poland held talks with North Korea on a debt write-off in 2011 and the North implemented what it was required to do under the agreement the same year.

According to the contract obtained by VOA, the agreement, signed in Pyongyang on June 1, 2011, stipulates that the North’s debt amounted to roughly US$4.31 million as of the reported year, including the production and delivery costs of Mi-2 military helicopters for which the Polish communist regime struck a deal with the North in 1986.

The report also said Poland’s debt relief was linked to the North’s provision of US$1.5 million in cash to purchase a ship to a North Korea-Poland joint venture shipping firm established in 1967.

Under the debt write-off deal, the North was also required to foot the bill of $200,000 to repair the Polish Embassy in Pyongyang. The repair project was based on an agreement between representatives from the two countries’ foreign ministries and the North was obligated to transfer the money to the embassy’s account.

In case the obligations are fulfilled, the agreement says, Poland will write off 61 percent of the North’s debt that corresponds to around $2.61 million.

North Korea currently owes debts to Sweden, Switzerland and Finland. The countries earlier said they had no intention of writing off the North’s debts.

Read the full story here:
N. Korea settles bill with Poland in 2012 after 61 pct of its debt written off: report
Yonhap
2017-10-25

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September 2017: NK-China trade figures

Tuesday, October 24th, 2017

By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Here’s a roundup of the September 2017 China-North Korea trade numbers, from various sources. Not surprisingly, most indicators are down. Still, China is letting North Korea import even while exports have been drastically decreased in most goods. A sign of confidence that they will get the money back in future exports from North Korea, perhaps?

Washington Post:

On Friday, China’s General Administration of Customs announced that China’s imports from North Korea fell 37.9 percent in September, the seventh successive monthly decline. China’s exports to North Korea dropped a more modest 6.7 percent in September, Huang Songping, spokesman for the customs department, said at a news conference.

Although there is room for considerable skepticism about official Chinese data — and the numbers can swing wildly month to month — there is reason to believe that there has been a recent slowdown in trade, experts say.

Chinese traders in the border city of Dandong told The Washington Post this month that they were feeling the effect of the sanctions, which were being imposed with unprecedented determination by the authorities.

[…]

North Korea’s deficit with China more than tripled in the first nine months of the year from the same period in 2016, to $1.07 billion, Huang told a news conference, according to Bloomberg News.

Full article:

China’s trade with North Korea slumps as nuclear sanctions finally start to bite
Simon Denyer
Washington Post
2017-10-13
James Pearson of Reuters has been tweeting some numbers:
  • [R]ice exports to N.Korea [down] 85.1% y/y at 2,396t
  • Sept corn exports to N.Korea [up] from year earlier, at 1,160t
  • China imports of N.Korea lead ore 84% y/y
  • China imports of iron ore [down] 98% y/y
  • China imports of N.Korea coal [down]  71.6% y/y

Some of these numbers can also be found reported by Reuters here.

NK News also reported on the numbers:

According to Chinese customs data collated by the Korea International Trade Association (KITA), China’s main exports to the DPRK mainly consist of various kinds of electrical items and machinery.

North Korea spent USD$52 million on importing Chinese electronics and machines in August, trade categories which include items like cell phones and computers.

The DPRK spent a further USD$23 million on importing vehicles from China. While some luxury vehicle exports would breach UN sanctions, the data indicates the majority of the imports consist of electric motorcycles and vehicles used for public transport or construction.

Yet China’s most recent trade figures continue to show that despite its falling income from trade, North Korea has managed to increase its spending on Chinese goods, pushing its balance of trade further into the red.

Without its coal revenues, North Korea has spent double its monthly trade earnings several times throughout 2017, and it’s unclear how long the country will be able to maintain the deficit.

Full article here:
Chinese FM defends growing trade with North Korea
Leo Byrne
NK News
2017-10-24

All in all, drops are pretty dire. Which, of course, also serves China’s geopolitical interests at this time. That’s not to say the numbers can’t be right, only that usual skepticism is warranted.

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Sanctions, and the weakness of North Korean food security

Wednesday, October 18th, 2017

By Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

While some Pyongyangites started off the week by checking out plasma-screen TV’s at a consumer goods fair, Daily NK published an ominous story that reminds the reader of the dark 1990s. Rumors are now circulating of a starvation death in Hyesan:

An increasing number of North Koreans are suffering from the effects of food insecurity and malnutrition, according to inside sources who spoke with Daily NK. A rumor is circulating in Ryanggang and North Hamgyong provinces that the body of someone who starved to death has been seen near the train station in Hyesan City.
“More than a handful of people have come forward and said that they saw the body of someone who starved to death near the Hyesan train station. The food situation was relatively good for the past few years, so it’s such a shame that we’ve returned to dire circumstances so suddenly,” a source in Ryanggang Province told Daily NK.
A source from North Hamgyong Province similarly reported that “a rumor is swirling around the market that a starved body was discovered. There are so many people talking about it that it’s being viewed as a fact.”
The source added that the credibility of the rumors is high, saying, “There was a severe drought at the beginning of the year in North and South Hamgyong provinces and Ryanggang Province. The corn and rice harvest did not meet its targets, amounting to approximately half the volume produced last year.”
Full article:
Food insecurity riles North Korea’s poorest provinces
Kim Chung Yeol
Daily NK
2017-10-18

As crude as it may sound, one cannot draw sharp conclusions from one unconfirmed death by starvation in a North Korean city. But the fact that people think conditions bad enough to believe such rumors to be true says something about the instability of food supply in North Korea right now.

For several years, the supply of food in North Korea has looked remarkably stabile compared to the 1990s. A combination of more freedom for the markets to operate, more leeway for farmers in how they operate, produce and sell their goods (and procure inputs such as fertilizer), larger and more consistent imports from China – these are all factors that have led to better food security overall in North Korea. Market prices have sent a clear message on this.

But perhaps “stabile” was the wrong way to describe food supply. “Consistent” may have been a better way of looking at it. A system is hardly stabile when a combination of relatively usual events for the country – bad weather and changing geopolitical conditions – can shake its core.

As usual with these dynamics, it would be wrong to attribute the changes to one single factor. That is, we cannot say that sanctions –> starvation in some automatic fashion. Rather, several trends have coincided and caused the dire situation:

First, North Korea has experienced a very troubling drought early on in the farming season. As Andy Dinville shows at 38North, using satellite data, weather conditions have been particularly bad this year, significantly harming this year’s harvest.

In any normal year since the early 2000s, when market mechanisms seriously became a routinized part of North Korea’s agricultural economic system, it seems that the effects of a drought could have been offset at least in part by increased imports from China, or other sorts of shifts.

Which brings us to a second factor, namely sanctions and the current tensions, and China’s enforcement of economic pressure on North Korea. Not only does this mean that overall trading conditions are difficult, and that Chinese sellers are wary of trusting that they’ll actually receive payments from North Korean buyers. It also means that goods such as fertilizer for farming are more difficult to acquire. Like the Daily NK article notes:

“Last year, North and South Hamgyong and Ryanggang provinces endured a flood of epic proportions and this year there was a drought, so the agricultural situation in both regions is poor. Additionally, because of the sanctions, it has been harder to procure different kinds of fertilizer necessary for farming, so this has exacerbated the damage.” he continued.
Third, the geopolitical instability naturally makes for a nervous market overall. The price of corn, for example, is up by 47 percent compared to last year. It is important to note that this sort of change in market prices has not been observable during the many instances in the past when international aid organizations have warned of food shortages in North Korea. Hoarding is a natural behavior on any market when actors believe a shortage is looming in the near future. It is a stark sign of the shift in China’s behavior from previous rounds of sanctions that North Korean markets now seem to confirm that China is putting real and heavy economic pressure on the country. The loopholes may still be there but they are much more narrow than usual.
As winter approaches, things aren’t likely to get any easier. Fuel shortages will make heating more difficult and expensive than usual for average North Koreans, particularly as the state soaks up oil and fuel from the market, raising prices further. Things may well get much worse before they get any better.
UPDATE 2017-10-24: 
A reader with extensive experience working on North Korean food security emailed a somewhat skeptical note regarding the food production decrease estimates I cite above. The main point is: even if food production goes down, it may not spell disaster as the past few years harvests have been exceptionally good in comparative perspective. I quote an excerpt here with the reader’s permission:
It really doesn’t look like there is much difference between positive and negative trends, particularly if you just look at the end of August. And his [Dinville] data compares the 2017 harvest with the 2016 harvest, which was probably the best harvest in 30 years. So even if 2017 is a bit lower than 2016, it will still be a relatively stable year and much, much better than 2001. There were no major disasters in the country, as well, aside from the drought and the effects of the flooding from last fall in a few counties in the northeast. My takeaway from his [Dinville’s] data is that there were a few fields (the red “strongly negative” portion) that couldn’t be irrigated sufficiently but we shouldn’t extrapolate to the entire country harvest. Kitchen gardens have also expanded in the country and can help to mitigate a poor harvest, at least for some families.
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