Like all North Korean adults, Song Un Pyol wears the faces of leader Kim Jong Un’s father and grandfather pinned neatly to her left lapel, above her heart. But on her right glitters a diamond-and-gold brooch. 

 

Song is what a success story in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea is supposed to look like. Just after Kim assumed power in late 2011, she started managing the supermarket floor at a state-run department store, which has freezers stocked full of pork and beef and rows of dairy, bakery and canned goods. She watches as customers fill their shopping carts, take their groceries directly to be scanned at the checkout counter and pay with cash or bank debit cards. 

 

Song is part of a paradigm shift within North Korea: Three generations into the Kim family’s ruling dynasty, markets have blossomed and a consumer culture is taking root. From 120 varieties of “May Day Stadium’’ brand ice cream to the widespread use of plastic to pay the bills, it’s a change visibly and irreversibly transforming her nation.

Market forces will out

While Kim has in recent weeks gained attention for his threat to fire missiles near Guam, his trademark two-track policy focuses on the development of both nuclear weapons and the economy. His acceptance of a more consumer-friendly economy is meant to foster economic growth and bring profits into the regime’s coffers. But like his pursuit of nuclear weapons, it’s a risky business. 

 

Facing even more international sanctions and a flood of Chinese imports that has generated a huge trade imbalance, there are good reasons to believe the North Korean economy is in a bubble that could soon burst. Prices for gasoline imports have soared more than 200 percent in less than six months, the AP has found. The price of rice is also believed to be sharply rising, although harder to independently confirm because of the difficulty in visiting local markets.

 

The new round of sanctions announced by the U.N. earlier this month will make it harder for the North to export its goods, cap the number of laborers it can send abroad — an important source of foreign currency for the regime — and limit the growth of joint ventures. North Korea will be hit particularly strongly by a Chinese ban on several key products, including coal, iron ore and seafood.

 

The problem, however, goes deeper than that. 

 

Market forces bring new forms of competition, uncertainty and change that are the antithesis of the centrally controlled, state-run economy of the North Korea of old. Markets are like a genie offering to grant the wish of wealth, but at the potential cost of political instability. 

 

Once the genie has been released from its bottle, it’s very hard to put it back in.

Guns and butter

 

The North Korean consumer landscape has evolved dramatically under Kim Jong Un. 

 

In keeping with his father, whose motto was “Military First,’’ Kim devotes nearly a quarter of North Korea’s estimated $30 billion GDP to defense spending, which is a far higher military burden than any other country in the world. But his new slogan of “Parallel Development’’ — guns and butter, so to speak — reflects an inescapable reality of his era.

 

In the 1990s, North Korea nearly imploded when the Soviet Union and its satellite empire collapsed. Reeling from floods, famine and an overwhelmed bureaucracy, it could no longer afford the public distribution system many North Koreans had depended on for their basic needs. This change sparked a wave of grassroots barter and trade, which has swollen into the burgeoning market economy today. 

Life in rural North Korea is still marked by far more hardship and scarcity than in its urban areas, and is hard even to compare to the showcase capital, Pyongyang. Yet there is, surprisingly, a bustling, almost booming, feeling in many parts of the country. 

Local control and entrepreneurs

Under a five-year plan for the economy Kim Jong Un announced last May, North Korean factories are putting a new priority on making more and better daily-life products. Managers, meanwhile, have more freedom to decide what to make, how much to pay their workers and how to forge profitable partnerships. 

 

Along the roads into virtually every city, street vendors, usually weather-beaten old women, sell fruits, vegetables and other food. In the cities, bazaar-style markets, shops and department stores are full of people. The shelves are lined with dozens of brands of domestically made cigarettes, sugary soft drinks and colorfully packaged chips or canned soups. 

 

In specialty shops, the latest “Pyongyang’‘ model smartphones, probably Chinese-made but rebranded to have a locally made appearance, go for $200. Apps to put on them, like the popular “Boy General’’ role-playing game, are $2 a pop. Pyongyang’s premier brewery, Taedonggang, just added an eighth kind of beer to its product line, which already includes beers dark and light, and even one that is chocolatey. 

 

Despite the ever-tightening sanctions, consumer products are still coming in from around the world. Buying a can of Pokka coffee from Japan is easy, and costs about 80 cents. Purchasing a Mercedes-Benz Viano might require some connections, but it is doable, for a $63,000 sticker price. 

 

Trade, yes; advertising, no

On the country’s bumpy highways, caravans of cram-packed long-distance buses and trucks hauling goods from city to city are common. More products made in Pyongyang are found in rural areas these days, and vice versa. Although the use of U.S. dollars or Chinese yuan remains widespread, more people are using prepaid cards or local bills at the checkout counter, suggesting greater buying power in general and more confidence in the stability of the national currency.

 

Some blatant manifestations of commercialism remain taboo. There are only three billboards in Pyongyang, a city of about 3 million. They advertise the local automaker, Pyonghwa Motors, and are more for the benefit of impressing foreign visitors than selling cars. There are no advertisements on television or in the newspapers. 

 

But stores are under instructions to be more consumer-friendly.

 

“At first, we opened the store from 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening,’’ said Song. “But in 2015, our dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un made sure that we serve from 10 in the morning to 8 in the evening so one can use late night at any given time, as many working people often used the shop during the evening after work.’’

Stores now commonly offer buy-two-get-one-free type sales and discounts on products the management wants to move off the shelves. Posters for new medicines or sports drinks can be seen inside shops and customers can sign up for “loyalty cards’’ to get points toward ever more discounts.

 

“In today’s North Korea there is a growing competition between the domestic companies themselves as they try to attract customers and establish reputable brands,’’ said Michael Spavor, a Canadian entrepreneur who visits the North frequently and is one of the only Westerners to have ever met Kim Jong Un. 

 

Spavor calls it a “brilliant strategy.’’ 

 

But the emphasis on locally produced consumer goods isn’t just because Kim wants to make good on his promise to give his people a higher standard of living. 

 

It’s also an attempt to counter the gravitational pull of China.

The power of China

 

As sanctions advocates rightly point out, cutting off trade with China would be catastrophic for Pyongyang. But North Korean leaders, including Kim Jong Un, have shown a great deal of concern over the flip side of that coin: What might happen to their country if trade continues, or grows larger. 

 

The expansion of trade increases Chinese leverage on the ground and feeds market forces that are hard for Pyongyang to keep under control. China accounts for nearly all of North Korea’s trade and its fuel. While the North has minimal dealings with the rest of the world, it did $2 billion worth of business with China in the first five months of this year alone.

 

During Kim Jong Un’s first three years in power, North Korea’s exports to China of coal, garments, minerals and seafood were all growing. But what North Korea was able to sell to China fell far short of what it needed to buy, particularly because of its need for oil and fuel products. 

 

That imbalance has widened dramatically this year as China cut back on buying from the North. The new U.N. sanctions will further squeeze the North’s main sources of export income.

​Signs of trouble

 

Georgetown University economist William Brown estimates the North is suffering an outflow of $200 million in foreign exchange every month. This is crucial because the more Pyongyang owes Beijing, the less it has to spend on other things. But it still needs essential commodities like food and fuel, which can deepen the problems of both shortages and inflation.

 

Right around April, according to data compiled by the AP, gasoline prices started to soar. Many stations either closed their gates or restricted the amount they would sell each customer. As of late July, the price surge had yet to abate.

 

Few North Koreans have their own cars. But gasoline, virtually all of which comes from China, fuels the transportation of goods and people in the new economy. 

 

Brown said the price of rice was also up nearly 20 percent in July from May and was significantly higher than a year ago. There could be a trickle-down effect, since tractors and even the fertilizer used to grow rice require petroleum products. Fears of a poor harvest in the fall could send prices shooting up.

 

“This may represent the greatest near-term threat to the regime stability,’’ Brown said.

 

North Korea has proven it is nothing if not resilient, often finding a way out of its economic problems. Even so, the longer-term changes to society won’t be easy to address.

 

The goods and trading opportunities spilling across the Chinese border are also spurring the growth of profitable enterprises, which has substantial financial benefits for well-connected individuals and, at least initially, the regime’s elite. For this tier of North Korean society — and for farmers who can profit from their excess produce — the new economy has opened up a way to get money from sometimes under-the-table businesses.

 

Loyalty to the regime and party ties remain an important means of social advancement. But, in Kim Jong Un’s North Korea these days, so is a good sense for how to run a proper side hustle to augment what are often paltry official paychecks.

 

However, the same opportunities have widened the gap between the rich by North Korean standards and the poor. The haves benefit disproportionately from the new economy, while a far larger number of have-nots live mostly outside the Pyongyang bubble of affluence. Ambiguity over what officials will overlook and what they will strictly enforce has also created a gray area that opens the door to corruption and bribery. 

 

Double-edged sword

 

The regime is not blind to what’s happening. It knows the new consumerism can be a destabilizing force. But it also knows it needs the markets.

 

North Korean officials insist markets are a stopgap coping measure for the economy that will be overcome. Kang Chol Min, a researcher with the Economics Institute of the Academy of Social Science, said the regime is trying to produce more, and better, goods to woo consumers away from the markets and back to state-run businesses. 

 

“The number of people relying on the state-run commercial networks is increasing,’’ he said in an interview with AP Television News. 

 

But many outside experts believe state enterprises and farms are too inefficient to provide enough goods and services for the whole nation without the help of markets and private activities. 

 

If they are right, it’s hard to imagine North Korea’s economic future will lie in Kang’s vow to produce more goods locally. Nor is it likely to be model worker Song, the state-sanctioned success story.

 

It might, however, be a Miniso store. 

 

Miniso is decidedly not trying to appeal to the shoppers by filling its shelves with products made in North Korea. It’s an international brand name — found in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney — selling bargain-priced goods such as backpacks and consumer electronics. Its Pyongyang store just opened in April, near two of the capital’s most prestigious universities in a newly built high-rise district appropriately called Ryomyong Gori, the “Avenue of Dawn.’’ 

 

It’s the trendiest shop in town.

 

And it’s a joint venture. With China.
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Steps away from this week’s NAFTA trade negotiations, business unified in hopes of sending a singular message: do no harm.

Representatives from the United States, Canada and Mexico convened behind closed doors at a Washington hotel in an effort to strike a new North American Free Trade Agreement. And not far away, industry representatives from all three nations sat waiting and hoping to influence the talks.

After two days of meetings, lobbyists admitted privately that they remained mostly in the dark, swapping rumors about dates and times of future meetings but unsure what progress was being made in the first round of discussions. The meetings were largely expected to be procedural, with little discussion on substance in the early days.

The decision to renegotiate NAFTA has largely been driven by politics, chiefly U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this year threatened to withdraw entirely.

Business, on the other hand, has largely praised the agreement and hopes to persuade all three governments to make minimal changes to the pact.

More than $1 trillion in trade

U.S.-Canada-Mexico trade has quadrupled since NAFTA took effect in 1994, surpassing $1 trillion in 2015.

“We’re all in the same boat,” said Flavio Volpe, president of the Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association. “In the end we all serve primarily the U.S. consumer. So if you’re going to raise the cost structure, or if you’re going to change the dynamic flow of goods or people in those three countries, you’re really hurting the cost to market for the U.S. customer.”

The U.S. had an autos and auto parts trade deficit of $74 billion with Mexico last year, without which, there would have been a U.S. trade surplus

The United States had a much smaller $5.6 billion automotive trade deficit with Canada last year, but autos was the still a major component of an $11.8 billion overall U.S. goods trade deficit with Canada last year. But including services trade, the United States ran an overall surplus with Canada.

Volpe’s counterparts from the United States and Mexico were also on hand, with hopes of presenting a united front not to see a disruption to the auto industry.

Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, which represents General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, stopped by the talks hotel to chat with negotiators, answer questions and “glean information” about U.S. negotiating objectives.

However, he said insights into the talks were hard to come by, as negotiating teams had not yet revealed details of their proposals to each other.

“There are a lot of poker-faces around here,” he said.

Lobbyists always nearby

He wasn’t the only American lobbyist floating in and out of the hotel. Some held lunch meetings in the hotel restaurants and then returned to their downtown offices. From mining, to textiles to dairy farmers, various groups held sideline meetings.

About 100 business representatives from Mexican companies waited in a meeting room to see if there were any questions negotiators might have for them. And Canadian industry groups mostly worked on their own.

For the most part, the business groups presented a united front.

Juan Pablo Castanon, president of the Mexican business group Consejo Coordinador Empresarial, said his group has been working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for three years. After the November U.S. elections, they began working to tout the benefits of NAFTA.

“The level of contact and communication is intense and one of collaboration,” Castanon said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby in Washington that represents companies big and small across the country, confirmed they plan to attend all the sessions, where they expect to hold sideline meetings with other business groups and government officials. The Chamber may also hold sideline events or briefings during future discussions.

Even industry groups who weren’t in agreement with their North American counterparts found other stakeholders to discuss common ground.

The Canadian Dairy Farmers are at odds with their American counterparts, but still found a chance to talk, said the Canadian group’s spokeswoman Isabelle Bouchard.

“To have discussions with counterparts within our own industry and even different industries who are in similar situations than us, it’s important, and we have seen though past trade negotiations how important it is,” Bouchard said.

 
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Auto industry groups from Canada, Mexico and the United States are pushing back against the Trump administration’s demand for higher U.S. automotive content in a modernized North American Free Trade Agreement.

At talks underway this week in Washington, automaker and parts groups from all three countries were urging negotiators against tighter rules of origin, said Eduardo Solis, president of the Mexican Automotive Industry Association.

But U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer confirmed the industry’s fears that the administration of President Donald Trump was seeking major changes to these rules to try to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.

“Rules of origin, particularly on autos and auto parts, must require higher NAFTA content and substantial U.S. content. Country of origin should be verified, not ‘deemed,’” Lighthizer said on Wednesday in opening remarks.

Fiat Chrysler, Ford, GM represented

Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland both said they were not in favor of specific national rules of origin within NAFTA — a position that the industry agrees with.

“We certainly think a U.S.-specific requirement would greatly complicate the ability of companies, particularly small- and medium-size enterprises, to take advantage of the benefits of NAFTA,” said Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council.

The trade group represents Detroit automakers General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler.

His comments were echoed by Flavio Volpe, president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association.

“Anytime you say this list or a part of this list has to come from one specific country you’re going to hurt all three countries,” he said.

Deficits can’t continue to grow

The United States had an autos and auto parts trade deficits of $74 billion with Mexico and $5.6 billion with Canada, both major components of overall U.S. goods trade deficits with its North American neighbors — deficits that Lighthizer said could no longer continue.

Lighthizer’s mention of tightening verification requirements is a reference to expanding the parts tracing list, which is used to determine whether companies meet the 62.5 percent North American content requirement for autos and 60 percent for components.

Devised in the early 1990s, the tracing list covers almost none of the sophisticated electronics found in today’s cars and trucks, most of which come from Asia. Putting these on the tracing list could force suppliers to source these components from North America or pay tariffs on them.

Software content a new issue

Volpe said any changes to this must also capture the North American system design work and software content for these components that is not currently included.

“A car today probably has 25 to 30 percent advanced electronics, software content in it. In 1994, it had zero or 1 percent,” Volpe said. “Could you address the tracing to help you get to NAFTA compliance level by capturing some of the work that’s being done in Silicon Valley or Waterloo, Canada? Yes.”

John Bozzella CEO of the Association of Global Automakers, which represents international-brand carmakers, said NAFTA has allowed a major expansion of auto exports, with more than 1 million more vehicles built annually in the United States than in 1993.

“Negotiators should be mindful of this success as they work to modernize the agreement,” Bozzella said, whose organization represents international brand carmakers with U.S. plants, including Toyota, Honda and BMW.

 
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U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Thursday that Washington wants more trade and investment with Latin America, pushing back against perceptions in the region that the Trump administration has an isolationist agenda.

Speaking during a visit to the Panama Canal at the end of a Latin American tour, Pence said the United States was seeking to keep the spirit of the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the pact now being renegotiated in Washington.

Pence said he wanted a NAFTA deal that was a “win, win, win” for the United States, Mexico and Canada, taking a more conciliatory tone than U.S. negotiators who have warned the deal needed a major overhaul to favor U.S. workers.

Pence later reiterated the United States’ concerns about the tense political situation in Venezuela, but took a more measured approach than U.S. President Donald Trump.

Last week, Trump said the United States had “many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary.”

Pence said on Thursday that Venezuela was becoming a dictatorship and that the United States would not stand by while it was destroyed.

He said he was sure the United States, with its allies in Latin America, would find a peaceful solution to the situation in Venezuela.

Panama’s President Juan Carlos Varela voiced concern over Venezuela and said that Panama would in the coming days announce measures against it, including immigration actions, to pressure Caracas into restoring democratic order.
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At CareerLink, the state job agency in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, custodial worker and former welder Glenn Hendrickson was looking to change careers. Hendrickson was just beginning his search for a new line of work and he did not yet know what would pique his interest.

But he for sure wasn’t interested in farm work, except as a last resort.

“I’ve had a lot of friends who have had summer jobs, like when they were in high school, picking fruit but I doubt anyone would make a career out of it,” he said.

According to local farm sector employers, most workers are paid well above Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Crew chiefs and foremen on some orchards earn close to $19 per hour. Yet few native-born Americans are willing to do this work, even if unemployed says Alan Dudley, administrator of the Gettysburg CareerLink office.

“The work is difficult, especially in the fields, and it’s not necessarily unskilled work,” he said. “Orchard owners want skilled people to harvest apples so they get the best return on their crop.”

Adams County’s farms, orchards, and processing plants are where the jobs are. The so-called “fruit belt” of vast peach and apple orchards extends across the region’s rolling green hills, along with the packing and processing companies and other agricultural-related businesses.

Tourism, with the 3 million visitors drawn annually to the historic Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, is the other main economic generator.

Adams County’s $580-million fruit industry depends heavily on immigrant labor, which is why the country may be facing an unintended consequence of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Businesses in the agricultural-based economy are experiencing labor shortages, and orchard owners are bracing for the possibility of not having enough workers for the fall harvest.

Fleeing workforce

Last month, six Hispanic employees of a county fruit-packing company, which does not want to be identified, were picked up by local police and turned over to immigration agents, who sent them to a detention facility. These and other detentions have had a chilling effect on the county’s Hispanic residents, who make up 6.5 percent of the population of some 100,000 people.

Yet because of the immigration crackdown, workers are not showing up or in some instances, have fled. The local plant of Hillandale Farms, a major national egg producer and distributor, was desperately seeking to fill vacant jobs this summer, according to a company official, because much of its Hispanic work force had disappeared.

As the autumn harvest approaches, the demand for labor is accelerating, Dudley says, not just in the orchards but also in the fruit processing and other agriculture-related industries.

“So they’re coming into their busy hiring season right now. For instance, Knouse Foods just last week posted about eight new positions on our job search website.”

‘No roving checkpoints’

Adams County voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in last November’s presidential election.

At the Latimore Valley fair in June, which attracted several thousand people to watch antique car races, trucking company secretary Kim Sanders expressed strong support for President Trump’s policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.

But, echoing the views of others at the fair who were asked the same question, Sanders wants the law-abiding undocumented immigrants to be able to stay.

“I hate to say it but there are not enough American people to go out and work on a farm, or do planting and pick vegetables like they will,” she said.

Republican Congressman Scott Perry, whose district includes Adams County, has heard the concerns of orchard owners and other businesses in the fruit industry. Perry told VOA his message to them is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has assured him nothing has changed in its enforcement actions.

“There’s not like roving checkpoints,” he said. “They’re targeted enforcement.”

But ICE has changed its policies somewhat. Acting-ICE chief Tom Homan told reporters at the White House last month that “…no populations are off the table. So non-criminals, those who have got a court order from a judge that refuse to leave, we’re looking for.”

Under the last two years of the previous Obama administration, non-criminals were not a priority and were often let go if detained.

Growers such as Kay Hollabaugh are running out of patience. She met last month with Congressman Perry and local lawmakers to express her concerns about the future of the Adams County fruit belt if the immigrant labor force is driven out.

“Those people who are making the laws of our land, eat every day,” she said. “If we could simply stop producing food for a month – OK, no food, no food – I think perhaps that would make some bells go off.”

Ripening fruit

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has galvanized activists in Adams County to press for immigration reform and to lobby local lawmakers to vote against measures that would target immigrant communities.

Jenny Dumont, a Spanish professor at Gettysburg College who leads the immigration lobbying effort for a grassroots group called “Gettysburg Rising, blames the Trump administration’s rhetoric for creating unwarranted fears about the undocumented.

“It’s pretty well documented that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans,” Dumont said. “My sense is that people, if they’ve had contact with immigrants here, that they understand the contributions that they make, they’re able to see them as people not just the label immigrant, the other.”

But Congressman Perry said the border would have to be secured before Americans would agree to any immigration reform measure.

“If you just seal the border without doing some of these other reforms, we’re going to have problems from a business standpoint as well, and I think they get that but again there’s this mistrust,” he said. “They want to see action not words,” the congressman said referring to border security.

As the push and pull over immigration policy plays out, farmers may get some relief as the federal government issues more visas for temporary agricultural workers, mainly from Mexico. The U.S. Labor Department has issued 20 percent more H-2A visas in 2017, compared to last year. Those visas are for seasonal agricultural work, such as harvesting berries, fruit or other crops.

But the visas require require farmers to demonstrate that no Americans will take the jobs they offer. In the meantime, the apple crop is ripening on the trees in Adams County. With harvesting about to begin in less than a month, orchard owners are not sure if enough workers will show up.

Kay Hollabaugh repeated what a top executive of a major food processor told her recently: “’If fruit goes, the Adams County economy falls and we’re out of business.’”
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