North Korea’s foreign currency earning operations in North Pyongan province have stepped up activity in April, with raw materials procurement officers fanning out across multiple counties to collect over 40 categories of natural products, in what appears to be a concrete push to shift from exporting raw materials to exporting processed goods.
A source in North Pyongan province told Daily NK on Monday that foreign currency earning bases in Jongju city, Kwaksan county, and Unjon county had recently received new collection quotas covering more than 40 product categories. Raw materials procurement officers (state-designated agents responsible for sourcing natural products for export through official foreign currency earning channels) have become noticeably more active as a result.
The collection list includes wild mountain vegetables currently in season, among them aralia shoots, aster greens, and bracken fern, as well as medicinal plants that had seen reduced collection activity in recent years, including wild ginger root, honeysuckle flower, mugwort, Chinese yam, evening primrose seeds, and acacia flower seeds. Medicinal creatures such as leeches, centipedes, and pill bugs also appear on the list in significant quantities.
“These are items that have long been used for foreign currency earning, but this time the procurement officers are not simply collecting them,” the source said. “They are looking at how much of each item can be secured and whether it can be processed, and running the two activities together.”
From raw materials to processed goods
North Korean authorities have long pushed trading companies to move away from exporting unprocessed raw materials and to expand exports of higher-value processed goods instead. That policy directive has repeatedly fallen short at the operational level, with aging equipment and insufficient technical capacity cited as the main obstacles.
What is different now, the source said, is that procurement officers are taking a more systematic approach. Rather than simply cataloguing what is available, they are assessing which items can be sourced reliably from specific areas, and mapping those supply chains directly to processing units.
“Procurement officers are absorbing not only materials organized through workplaces and schools, but also individually gathered supplies coming through the markets,” the source said. “And they are not just aggregating those materials. They are also running processing operations that take items through drying, pickling, powdering, and packaging before they go to market as finished products.”
The source interpreted the activity as evidence that the authorities’ longstanding directive to move away from raw material export dependency is finally gaining traction on the ground, even if progress remains gradual.
“The state has been giving instructions for a long time to stop selling raw materials as they are and to make processed goods for export, but implementation in the field was poor,” the source said. “These days results are starting to appear one by one. Even if the scale is small, the variety of processed goods has clearly increased compared to before, and the fact that procurement officers have become this busy is itself proof that processed goods exports are starting to take off in earnest.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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