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A view of North Korea’s bare mountains from the inter-Korean border in Gangwon County. (Yonhap News)
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Speculation abounds concerning current status of North Korea’s deforestation amid unreliable data
After an agreement was reached during a meeting of the inter-Korean forestry cooperation subcommittee on Oct. 22 to work toward modernizing 10 tree nurseries in North Korea within the year and exterminating the pinewood nematode in North Korea by March of next year, the next question concerns the current state of forests in North Korea. There’s widespread awareness of the severe deforestation in North Korea, a country in which mountains cover 80 percent of the land, but there aren’t any officially recognized figures on this issue. A report about prospects for environmental climate change in North Korea that was published in 2012 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) based on data received from North Korea’s Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection stated that there were 8,927,300 ha (hectares) of forest land in North Korea as of 2005. The North says that 1,284,100 ha of this, or 14 percent, is deforested. This is sharply contradicted by figures released in 2008 by South Korea’s National Institute of Forest Science, under the Korea Forest Service. The institute’s latest figures (2008), which are released every 10 years after analyzing satellite imagery, estimated that were 2.84 million ha of deforested land in North Korea. This represented a 74 percent increase from the 1.63 ha reported in the previous survey (1999). The implication is that 32 percent of North Korea’s total forested area, or 47 times the area of Seoul, is deforested. But both of these are estimates, which is the reason that experts say that joint surveys and research are critical for inter-Korean forestry cooperation. North Korea’s deforestation is believed to have been exacerbated by the combination of famine, energy crisis and economic recession that hit the country in the 1990s amid natural disasters and the splintering of the socialist bloc. The deforestation was the consequence of chopping down too many trees, both to collect firewood for fuel and to clear land for farming. North Korea has made an effort to restore its forests – passing forestry legislation in 1992, establishing the Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection in 1996 and establishing a 10-year plan (2001-2010) for creating forestry resources in 2000, and current leader Kim Jong-un has taken an even greater interest in this area. North Korea’s likely lack of materials and resources for reforestation projects It’s thought that Kim Song-jun, deputy director of the General Forestry Bureau at North Korea’s Ministry of Land and Environmental Protection, may have expressed some dissatisfaction on this point during the meeting of the inter-Korean forestry cooperation subcommittee on Oct. 22. In the words of Park Jong-ho, deputy director of the Korea Forest Service, the agreements reached during the meeting (modernizing 10 nurseries in North Korea within the year, providing pesticides for the pine wood nematode in November, working together to exterminate the pest by March 2019 and carrying out pest extermination efforts on a seasonal and yearly basis) “failed to meet the expectations” of North Korea, which is “waging a war to restore its forests.” “My understanding is that North Korea has a substantial amount of technological capability. They probably have a strong demand for the resources and materials that they lack,” said Woo Jong-su, director of Green One Korea. The specific areas of support that South and North Korea announced after their meeting had to do with cooperation in the production of forestry equipment and materials, including transparent panels for greenhouses and containers for nurseries. Considering that nursery modernization requires greenhouses, growth environment control systems (automatic temperature control apparatus), irrigation and shading facilities, low-temperature sapling storage facilities, and seed planting equipment, only the most basic of these materials appear to have been brought up during the meeting. “The issue of the budget probably kept the two sides from discussing large-scale facility support in the short term,” said an expert who spoke on condition of anonymity. Separately from this, the budget proposal for inter-Korean forestry cooperation that the Korea Forest Service submitted to the office of Democratic Party lawmaker Rep. Kim Hyeon-gwon shows that the agency is planning to invest 7.5 billion won (US$6.6 million) to build a tree nursery on state-owned land in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, with the aim of helping North Korea. By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
