By Yi Whan-woo
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| Cuckoo rice cooker |
North Korea has been smuggling electric rice cookers made by South Korean firms at the suspended Gaeseong Industrial Complex (GIC) to China,
according to a source familiar with the matter.
The cookers include the premium brand Cuckoo that is famous in South Korea and China for quality and its signature Korean voice navigation.
The smuggling comes as South Korean tenant companies at the joint factory park in Gaeseong, North Korea, hang on to a slim hope of resuming business there amid the reconciliatory mood on the Korean Peninsula.
The GIC shutdown in February 2016 inflicted heavy economic loss on 124 tenant companies, all small and medium enterprises whose assets, including finished goods, were seized by North Korea. The Ministry of Unification said last week reopening the factory park should be considered after the U.S.-led sanctions on North Korea are lifted, but progressive politicians want a prompt reopening.
"A trading company affiliated with the North Korean military has been smuggling electronic rice cookers out to China little by little since last year," a source in North Pyongan Province told Radio Free Asia last week.
"The smuggling has grown into a large-scale operation from a couple of weeks ago, with thousands of electronic rice cookers being secretly sold to Dandong in the Chinese border province of Liaoning. The smuggled goods were loaded on trucks and were delivered to a wholesaler in the region."
The source said the trading company, with the help of a Korean Chinese broker, sold thousands of Cuckoo rice cookers to a Chinese merchant who paid in cash.
There are estimated to be thousands of rice cookers of various brands in stock at the GIC, the source said.
"The North's trading companies are in a rush to sell the remaining South Korean rice cookers to China amid speculation that the GIC may resume in the near future," the source said.
As part of a sales campaign, smugglers are even distributing a list of brands, with their prices and quantities, to potential buyers, the source said.
Some electronic rice cookers are smuggled into North Korea's biggest market in Pyongsung, about 32 kilometers northeast of Pyongyang.
They are sold for $200 or more each, while Chinese-made electronic rice cookers are $30 to $50, the source said. Meanwhile, smuggling led by Pyongyang's state-run trading companies has increased dramatically, a source in Ryanggang Province said.
"It puts the living of individuals who relied on small-scale smuggling at risk," the source said. "The state-run trading firms are cooperating with border units and running well-organized smuggling to overcome the U.N. sanctions that have made Pyongyang's regular global trade difficult."
The source said tighter border control is another obstacle for individual smugglers.
"In the past, those individuals could bribe the border guards to cross the river into China and sell their goods," the source said. "But with barbed-wire fences everywhere and high authorities jumping into the smuggling business, it is now impossible for the guards to collaborate with individual smugglers."
