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PYONGYANG WATCH
Charcoal heroes
By Aidan Foster-Carter
Our last column
(North Korea caves in to the
market, August 5) looked at the
epochal, if secretive, changes that North Korea is
introducing to bring its economy more into line with the
real world. Yet even as Pyongyang was plotting a stiff
dose of market medicine (not by that name, of course),
its media - unalerted, or on autopilot - were still
singing a very different tune: the same old song as
before. One such item caught my eye, thanks to BBC
Monitoring. Carried in the party daily Rodong Sinmun on
June 29, on the very eve of drastic price reforms, this
purportedly heroic tale unwittingly shows to what
straits North Korea's once proud economy had sunk.
So let's hear it for comrade Song Kwan-to, party
secretary at the Sinyang Pit Timber production base: way
up in North Korea's northern forests, miles from
anywhere. To adapt the Monty Python ditty, he's a
lumberjack - but is he okay? It's a tough old life. The
paper admits they don't have the proper tools as they
once did. "When mechanical saws are in short supply, the
functionaries and workers cut the wood with handsaws and
axes, and when the bulldozers and tractors stop, they
drag the logs down to the interim woodlots even if they
must employ draglines and gang chains" (or chain
gangs?).
Pause a moment to reflect on this.
We're talking big-league industrial forestry here.
Timber is a major export, and also vital (as in this
case) to prop up, literally, the mining sector. So how
do they cut the trees down? By hand. And how do they
transport the logs? By pulling them. You'd think the
industrial revolution never happened. In today's North
Korea, it's back to the most primitive and least
efficient of all energy sources: human muscle power.
Wasn't socialism supposed to improve on capitalism?
And yet there are, or were, bulldozers and
tractors. So why did they stop? Again, Rodong Sinmun is
fairly frank. "Fuel could not be supplied on time on
account of the nation's circumstances, and then when it
was supplied, the amount was woefully insufficient to
carry out production tasks." No oil: the bane of North
Korea's industry, as surely and fatally as no food is
for her people. The reason for both is that Moscow
abruptly ended cheap fuel and fertilizer in 1991; since
then North Korea hasn't adjusted, as it could and should
have, to find new friends or produce salable goods to
earn money for imports.
Muscle has its limits.
With some understatement, the paper notes: "However, it
was quite difficult to work out the final transport [to
the railhead] without fuel." Solution: find another
fuel. Elsewhere, Secretary Song had heard of vehicles
being adapted to run on methane gas. That they didn't
possess either; but how about charcoal? There was plenty
of wood to burn: not the prime timber crop, naturally,
but "abundant scrub trees". (Abundant? Other reports
suggest that North Korea's forest cover, never fully
restocked after US napalm frazzled it half a century
ago, is now badly denuded as both firms and households
cut down whatever they can to burn, especially during
the horrendously cold winters.)
And yet some
people weren't keen: "acceptance of the alternative fuel
was not a smooth process at all". Why? Perhaps they saw
it for what it was: another great leap backward. The
Seoul daily Chosun Ilbo has graphically described the
North's charcoal-fueled country buses: towing their
furnace behind them, belching out foul and carcinogenic
gases, grotesquely inefficient, max speed 20 km/h, dodgy
on hills.
But the party soon silenced the
complainers. "Responsible functionaries roused the
enthusiasm of the workers by instilling deeply in them
that actively using an alternative fuel to increase
production is, through the log production itself, an act
of faithfully upholding the military-first leadership of
the respected and beloved general." And conversely, of
course, fainthearts are slackers - or traitors.
Result: happy ending. Sinyang's vehicles have a
98 percent operations rate, and they make enough
charcoal to send to units elsewhere. The moral? "The
great leader Kim Jong-il pointed out: 'In whatever
affair, it is important to stick to it mentally. No
matter how difficult the task may be, if you stick to it
with the firm resolve to carry it through to the end,
then the means will appear and strength will come.'"
What rot. With all credit to Secretary Song's
resourcefulness, he should never have been put in such a
position in the first place. In the space age and the IT
era, this is no way to run a railroad, or a timber
operation, or anything. Economics is about efficiency,
not heroics and loyalty - let alone reverting to
techniques hardly less primitive than those used
millennia ago to build the pyramids of ancient Egypt.
So blame the perverse father and son pharaohs
who, in a trajectory unique in modern history, marched
their people out of the promised land back into the
wilderness. Once, North Korea did deliver rising living
standards and development. Chainsaws and bulldozers
replaced biceps. But times changed, yet the pharaohs
stubbornly refused to adapt.
They would, they
did, rather see national income shrink by half, trade
fall by two-thirds, and up to 2 million of their people
starve, than admit they might possibly have been wrong
about a few things; or even grant that new times demand
new methods. If Kim Jong-il has at last seen the light,
he has much to make amends for - and a huge amount of
ground to catch up.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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