North Korean coal trade: the questions that really matter

By: Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

I have long argued, on this blog and elsewhere, that the question of North Korea and economic sanctions is not a binary one. We don’t have either perfect sanctions implementation with complete suppression of trade, or smuggling and trade under the radar, with or without the complicity of the Chinese government, making sanctions on North Korea meaningless. Rather, sanctions were never going to work perfectly to begin with — government measures rarely do. What sanctions do do, however, is to impose high additional costs to anyone trading with North Korea. North Korea would still import and export sanctioned goods to some extent, but reap lower revenues from exports and pay more for imports.

US intelligence claims over the past few months have contained some information that is highly relevant to that end. Ship-to-ship (STS) transfers are complicated and expensive, but it seems that this method of transferring North Korean coal to Chinese buyers has begun to decrease. Wall Street Journal reports (paywall) that direct deliveries to China, through the Ningbo-Zhoushan area, have increased in frequency over the past few months. Chinese ships have also gone directly to North Korea’s Nampo port to fetch coal deliveries.

The UN Panel of Experts noted this trend already in its March 2020 report:

67. Ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Tonkin (see S/2019/691, para. 20) have decreased substantially in favour of increased deliveries to the Ningbo-Zhoushan and Lianyungang port areas in China. The increase reinforces the need for port and customs authorities to heighten scrutiny of vessels and their shipping documentation, and to impound any vessel suspected of transporting prohibited items.

We still don’t know how widespread such trade is, but it significantly lowers the transaction costs of North Korea’s coal trade, and thereby lessens the impact of sanctions on North Korea’s export revenue.

What about proportions?

• According to the WSJ report and US intel sources, North Korea exported 4.1 million metric tons of coal between January and September 2020.
• No one knows what North Korea paid, but the WSJ report assumes a price of $80–100 per ton in 2020. This places the value of the exports between $330 and $410 million.
• Is that a little or a lot? Well, it depends. According to UN Comtrade figures, North Korea exported on average 1.7 million metric tons of coal per month to China in 2015. In contrast, 4.1 million metric tons between January and September gives close to half a million metric tons per month. In April 2016, coal exports totalled 1.53 million metric tons, to the tune of $72.3 million.
• The WSJ figures place North Korean revenue at $36.6-$45.5 million on average per month for January-September. Using the 2016 April figure as a benchmark, it is absolutely not an insignificant number. At the same time, it is nowhere near — really, less than half by one measure — what North Korea has received for its coal exports in the past.

This by no means gives a perfect representation of the proportions at hand. After all, both 2015 and 2016 were boom years for North Korean coal exports to China. At the same time, judging from this limited data, we should not assume that things are back to normal only because China’s sanctions implementation seems to have begun to taper off. At the moment, it’s also very difficult to tell what proportions of the downturn in trade originates from North Korea’s own, self-imposed border lockdown, and from sanctions respectively.