If you’d picked up the Rodong Sinmun on March 2, the story of the day would have been clear. Right on the front page, the Pyongyang daily exhorted citizens to work, not in harvesting wheat or smelting iron, but in planting trees. North Koreans should strive together, the paper urged, battling with a “patriotic mind” to “transform all the mountains of the fatherland into mountains of gold and treasure, lush with green forests.” 

Forests have long been a key symbol of the regime’s prosperity, and Tree-planting Day has been a yearly event in the DPRK since 1946. But between economic collapse and ecological mismanagement, the country lost around a quarter of its trees between 1990 and 2005, with environmental and humanitarian disasters trailing in the wake. 

With the support of foreign NGOs, the DPRK does appear to be making a sincere effort to reforest its countryside. Yet with timber-hungry China just across the Yalu River, North Koreans have countless opportunities to export lumber illicitly. Combine that with haphazard infrastructure and a weak state, and for every tree planted, another risks disappearing forever — with potentially catastrophic consequences for the country’s food security and political stability.

LIFE AMONG THE PINES

Koreans have cared for their forests since centuries before Tree-planting Day was ever conceived. For 500 years, the country’s Joseon dynasty honed a sophisticated system of forestry management, carefully cultivating the peninsula’s native pines to build ships and houses. As late as 1945, even after decades of Japanese occupation and industrialization, up to 80% of North Korea was covered by woodland, research has shown.

At the same time, the country’s trees have historically held deep spiritual resonance for the Korean people, explains Robert Winstanley-Chesters, an expert on North Korean natural resources at the University of Leeds.

“The forests historically covered the mountains — and the mountains themselves were spiritually significant,” he said. 

As one old saying puts it: “We were born with pines, live among pines and will be buried in the pinery on the rear mountain.”

North Korean leaders, while keen to squeeze superstition out of their subjects, clearly understood the power of trees as a unifying force. Announcing the first Tree-planting Day in 1946, Kim Il Sung clambered to the top of Moranbong, a hill in central Pyongyang, and planted a tree. It was, state propaganda claims, a slap in the face of the “Japanese imperialists” who had so recently occupied the country. 

Trees have traditionally been central to the country’s economic plans as well, at least in theory. In 1958, for instance, Kim declared that tree-planting “should be carried out through a mass movement” and by 1960 he announced that if “we plant many orchards, our people will become happier in seven or eight years,” according to Winstanley-Chesters’ 2015 book.

Despite these ambitions — the Seven-year Plan of 1961 ordered the planting of about 980,000 acres of trees — reality would never match the soaring rhetoric. The Korean War had already splintered much of North Korea’s forests, while by 1980 economic priorities had shifted toward cement, chemical fertilizers and other areas, Winstanley-Chesters wrote.

What forests did remain were increasingly cut down to make paper and other manufactured goods. By 1990, forests shrunk to 70.5% of the DPRK, down around 4% from a decade earlier, researchers have found.

The real disaster came after the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, a DPRK forestry specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. He explained that the end of support from Moscow, to say nothing of the famine that followed, forced North Koreans to cut down more trees than ever. Some people survived by gnawing on tree bark, while millions of trees were felled for fuel. 

The catastrophes of the 1990s ruined North Korea’s forests. Between 1990 and 2005, 24.6% of its forest cover disappeared, and between 2000 and 2005, it lost nearly 2% of its trees each year, one study concluded. This decline, in turn, has led to an ecological nightmare. 

“Without trees, there can be serious damage caused by landslides when there’s a flooding season,” said Annie Young Song, a researcher at the University of Sydney. To make matters worse, she continued, every upland flood ruins valley crops like rice — which in turn forces farmers to replace more trees with paddies. 

The lack of trees means that the topsoil across much of the DPRK is poor, exacerbating the food crisis even further. And that’s in a mountainous country where just 17% of land is suitable for agriculture.

Animals that rely on North Korea’s thick woodlands, including majestic Siberian tigers, have also seen their habitats shrink. Amur leopards may in fact be totally extinct on the peninsula. 

DESOLATE LANDSCAPES

Hong Sang-Young, secretary general of the Seoul-based Korean Sharing Movement (KSM), has visited North Korea “dozens of times” each year since 1999, and he has seen with his own eyes what the country’s hillsides have been reduced to. He described them as devastated — so empty that you can practically play soccer on them. 

Liaising closely with local officials, Hong and his team have developed a seedling nursery in the province of North Hwanghae, erecting modern greenhouses to host plants and importing the best nutrients to help them grow. Hong said this was challenging work, particularly given how poor native seedlings were, but the agriculturalists have still aimed to plant as many as 467,000 seedlings in a single year, including thousands of Korea’s illustrious pines. Other outsiders have come too, including American experts invited to a 2013 conference. 

It’s clear that the regime, right to the very top, accepts it needs to rebuild its forests — even if that means looking abroad for help. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un himself admitted in a 2015 speech to senior officials that “the precious forest resources of the country have decreased to a great extent.” 

And if food security wasn’t reason enough to make a change, the DPRK is also incentivized via the U.N.’s carbon credit framework, Winstanley-Chesters explained. In addition to being a non-nuclear way of proving its “developmental legitimacy,” he said, growing carbon dioxide-absorbing trees can also make it money. 

After developing renewable projects — for instance reforestation — the regime can trade the “carbon credits” on the international market to more polluting countries. Though statistics on timber specifically are scarce, in 2016 the DPRK outlined a plan to make $5.5 million a year through such a scheme.

Not that Kim has relied on foreign handouts alone. In 2001, Song noted, the country announced a national forestry plan aimed at growing over 3.5 million acres of trees over the next decade, though the DPRK never officially reported details and results of the plan. Another plan followed in 2015 as well as  harsh punishments, including death, for illegal logging. Hong added that every province in the DPRK now boasts its own sapling nursery. 

Yet Silberstein argued that fundamental flaws in the North Korean economy mean that any anti-logging law is always going to be tough to enforce. With two in five North Koreans still facing malnutrition — and the regime unable to feed or heat its citizens properly — people are going to cut down trees no matter the dangers, Silberstein suggested.

Even the much-touted Tree-planting Day has its flaws: The physical labor involved is strenuous, and many recruited to partake in official campaigns end up dumping their saplings in a single spot. Those saplings that do make it into the soil often die before they can take root, while others are dug up before maturing.

CHINA’S ROLE

Take a train from the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang south to the border town of Dandong and you will see a treeless countryside for much of the 150-mile journey, according to Justin Hastings, a professor of international relations at the University of Sydney. 

The barrenness of China’s remote northeast, he said, is key to understanding why North Korea’s reforesting efforts may be doomed: With their own supply ravaged, Chinese lumber traders are increasingly looking south to get their fix. 

Official statistics give little indication of the problem. According to South Korean government data, North Korea only exported $14.66 million worth of “wood and wood products” to China in 2017. By 2019, that figure had dropped to a mere $2.58 million. Yet below these legal deals, Hastings said, lies an ocean of “informal” trade that could account for 90% of the total. 

So how does North Korean timber actually reach China? A general picture emerges from Hastings’ interviews with local businesspeople on the Sino-Korean border. 

After making contact with North Korean officials, Hastings said, Chinese traders secure visas allowing them to spend three weeks out of every four building trust south of the Yalu River that demarcates the border. They sometimes bring gifts: For impoverished North Koreans, a working generator or new household appliance can go a long way. From there, the partners communicate via cell phone. Near the Yalu River, even people in North Korea can pick up a Chinese signal. 

Winstanley-Chesters added that traders meet at preapproved border crossings to do business and North Koreans often float logs down the Yalu to their destination. 

The Chinese authorities, for their part, seem pretty relaxed about the whole arrangement. “If it’s not weapons, or drugs, or anything banned by the WMD-related sanctions, they don’t necessarily care that much,” Hastings said.

The Pyongyang government may be deeply committed to reforestation in theory, Hastings added, but that means little if army officers or provincial bureaucrats near the Chinese border want to boost their salaries or fund their factories. The authorities are helpless to stop them. 

In fact, there is some evidence that the regime’s apparatus contributes to the cutting down of North Korean timber. According to a Radio Free Asia report citing unnamed sources, soldiers in North Korea sometimes work as loggers, with the fruits of their labor exchanged for the Chinese rubber needed at a tire factory near the border. 

And satellite photos analyzed in 2013 found that the land around Camp 16, a remote gulag near Chongjin, was denuded of trees. The cameras also picked up trucks carrying timber away from the facility. Their destination is unknown, but the Chinese frontier is just 70 miles away.

BURIED IN THE PINERY

Precisely how much North Korean timber ends up in China is impossible to gauge. Yet both Winstanley-Chesters and Hastings agreed that exports, together with impromptu deforestation for food and fuel, ultimately risk canceling out whatever progress groups like the Korean Sharing Movement can make. 

“This is not going to be solved unless they come up with a plan that can actually be implemented over the long term,” Hastings said.

Song said a genuinely sustainable forestry policy is a political necessity for Pyongyang. Though the pandemic has occupied the government’s attention of late, logging and associated problems could still become an existential threat. 

“The forest policy of North Korea is closely aligned with the regime’s survival in a fundamental way,” Song explained. “Continued food insecurity may lead to political instability in the future.” 

The North Korean experiment may no longer live among pines — but it could yet be buried by them.

Edited by Bryan Betts