In South Korea’s largest shipyard, thousands of workers in yellow hard hats move ceaselessly between towering cranes lifting hulks of steel. They look like a hive of bees scurrying over a massive circuit board as they weld together the latest additions to the rapidly growing fleet of tankers carrying super-chilled liquefied natural gas across the world’s oceans. 

The boom in fossil-fuel production in the United States has been matched by a rush on the other side of the Pacific to build the infrastructure needed to respond to the seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy among Asia’s top economies. When Congress lifted restrictions on shipping crude oil overseas in 2015, soon after the Obama administration opened the doors for international sales of natural gas, even the most boosterish of Texas oil men wouldn’t have predicted the U.S. could become one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel exporters so quickly.  

Climate experts say there is little doubt increased American production and exports are contributing to the recent rise in planet-warming carbon emissions by helping keep crude prices low, increasing consumption in developing economies.  

Better than dirtier fuel, some say

Backers of U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, argue that the boom will produce environmental benefits because it will help China and other industrial nations wean themselves from coal and other dirtier fossil fuels. 

Environmentalists counter that the massive new supplies unleashed by American advances in extracting natural gas from shale doesn’t just make coal-fired power plants less competitive. LNG also competes with such zero-carbon sources of electricity as nuclear, solar and wind — potentially delaying the full adoption of greener sources. That’s time climate scientists and researchers say the world doesn’t have if humans hope to mitigate the worst-case consequences of our carbon emissions, including catastrophic sea-level rise, stronger storms and more wildfires.  

“Typically, infrastructure has multi-decadal lifespans,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “So, if we build a natural-gas plant today, that will impact carbon emissions over decades to come. So those are the critical and crucial decisions that are being made today. Do we increase access to and use of fossil fuels, or do we make decisions that limit and eventually reduce access to fossil fuels?”  

Boon to shipyards

While it is difficult to estimate how much America’s rise as major exporter of fossil fuels is contributing to a hotter climate, some of the economic benefits are plain to see in South Korea’s shipyards. 

At the sprawling Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering facility on the island of Geoje, more than half of the 35 vessels scheduled for delivery in 2018 were LNG carriers. A similar number of vessels are lined up for completion next year. 

It’s the same story at the two other major Korean yards. The construction of the big gas tankers has been credited with lifting the nation’s shipbuilding sector out of the doldrums from a decade ago, when the Great Recession caused a downturn in transoceanic trade.  

South Korea’s big three shipbuilders — Daewoo, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Samsung Heavy Industries — won orders for 53 new LNG carriers in 2018 at about $200 million each, soaking up the lion’s share of the 62 vessels ordered globally, according to numbers compiled by the London-based shipping group Clarkson Research. South Korea is expected to finish 2018 at the top spot in overall orders for new commercial ships, surpassing China for the first time in seven years. 

“We are getting out of a long tunnel,” Song Ha-dong, a senior Daewoo executive, said as he surveyed the company’s 1,200-acre yard from above the British Contributor, a gargantuan LNG carrier with a freshly painted deck covered in a maze of pipes. “The U.S.-led shale gas boom is getting fully under way, and China, Japan and South Korea are increasing their consumption of natural gas.”  

During a recent visit by The Associated Press, three of the LNG carriers were being assembled inside a massive dry dock. Another 13, including the British Contributor, had been floated out to nearby berths where workers were putting on finishing touches.  

The Korean shipyards have developed a niche in building ships with the complex systems needed to transport natural gas. The gas is compressed and liquefied for storage by keeping it really cold, about -260 Fahrenheit. In this liquid state, natural gas is about 600 times smaller than at room temperature. 

Top three importers

The British Contributor is as long as three football fields and can carry enough liquefied gas to fill about 70 Olympic-sized swimming pools — nearly two days’ national supply for South Korea. The country used about 1.9 trillion cubic feet of LNG in 2017, finishing third behind China and Japan as the world’s biggest importers, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

With no domestic oil and gas resources and an unfriendly neighbor blocking overland shipments from the north, South Korea relies exclusively on oceangoing tankers. Nearly half of South Korea’s gas imports come from Qatar and Australia, but the share shipped from the U.S. is growing fast as additional export terminals along the Gulf coast are coming online to handle the glut of gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. 

U.S. LNG exports quadrupled in 2017, with this year on track to see similarly exponential growth. Nearly a fifth of all that gas goes to South Korea.  

The British Contributor is the third of six LNG carriers being built by Daewoo for British energy giant BP, which will mainly use them to transport U.S. gas to Asia under a 20-year contract with the Freeport LNG facility south of Houston. Daewoo delivered four similar ships this year to the government-owned Korea Gas Corporation, which has a 20-year deal to buy gas exported from Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana. 

South Korea has been vying with Mexico for the title of the largest importer of U.S. LNG, and its reliance on gas could further increase under the government of President Moon Jae-in, who has pledged to transition his country away from nuclear power following the Fukushima meltdown in Japan.  

Park Moo-hyun, a senior analyst at Hana Financial Investment, predicts shipping companies will need to place orders for around 480 new LNG carriers over the next decade to match the U.S.-driven increase in global LNG trade — roughly doubling the current worldwide fleet. 

“The impact brought by the emergence of shale is not just about an increase in U.S. energy exports — there has been tremendous growth in the production of energy sources that hadn’t been used much, such as LNG,” Park said. “Once the groundwork is established for the stable use of these new energy sources, industries are pushed to adapt.” 

Natural gas has the added appeal of producing about half the carbon dioxide of coal when it’s burned. Its increased adoption for generating electricity has been pitched by the U.S. and others as a way for nations to make progress toward meeting their emissions reductions goals under the 2015 Paris climate accord. Burning gas also creates less particulate pollution. 

In China, the Communist government has declared a “Blue Sky Defense War” to reduce the choking smog in Beijing and two dozen surrounding cities with a program to convert hundreds of thousands of homes and industrial facilities from burning coal to gas.  In February, Texas-based Cheniere signed a 25-year deal with the state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation to export LNG from its export terminal in Corpus Christi. 

Carbon emissions increase

But the increased gas exports from the U.S. and other sources hasn’t really put much of dent in Chinese coal consumption, which has remained largely flat in 2018. Overall carbon emissions for China, the globe’s biggest emitter, increased nearly 5 percent in 2018.  

Daniel Raimi, a researcher at the Washington-based think tank Resources for the Future, said determining whether U.S. gas exports are a net good or bad for the climate is difficult. When considering China, researchers can’t just look at whether coal use or carbon emissions are falling. They must also try to calculate how much more coal would have been burned had ample supplies of gas not been available. 

Another challenge is that the primary component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps far more heat in the atmosphere than a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. Studies have shown that a significant amount of natural gas leaks into the air at almost every stage of its production and transport — from wells to pipelines, processing facilities to ships. Raimi said the impact of all that leaking methane on the climate is roughly 84 times more powerful than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. 

As part of its broad rollback of environmental rules, the Trump administration moved in September to weaken Obama-era regulations designed to prevent methane from escaping into the atmosphere during oil and gas operations. The regulatory rollbacks are part of President Donald Trump’s pro-industry “Energy Dominance” strategy to ramp up U.S. fossil fuel production without concern for the corresponding increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Trump has falsely claimed climate change is a “hoax,” and he moved in 2017 to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris accord. 

“With or without increased U.S. oil and gas exports, ambitious policy measures are the essential ingredient to achieving long-term climate goals such as those laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement,” Raimi said. “For U.S. LNG exports to reduce global emissions, they must primarily displace coal, and methane emissions must be limited both domestically and abroad.” 
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Wall Street stocks finished solidly higher Thursday following a late-afternoon surge as worries over slowing economic growth gave way to bargain-hunting.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished at 23,138.82, an increase of 1.1 percent and up some 870 points from the low point of the session.

The broad-based S&P 500 climbed 0.9 percent to 2,488.83, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.4 percent to 6,579.49.

The push into positive territory came in the final 30 minutes of the session. While trading is usually light during Christmas week, data has suggested volumes more in line with non-holiday sessions.
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Tesla Inc has registered a financial leasing company in China, a local business registration filing shows, in the latest sign the U.S. electric car maker is attempting to speed up its push into China.

The California-based carmaker, led by billionaire Chief Executive Elon Musk, has opened a wholly-owned financial leasing unit in Shanghai’s free trade zone with registered capital of $30 million, according to China’s National Enterprise Information Publicity System.

Its scope includes leasing and consultancy, the document said, which listed the firm’s legal representative as Zhu Xiaotong, Tesla’s boss in China.

Tesla declined to comment.

The company has opened a tender process to build its Shanghai Gigafactory and at least one contractor has started buying materials, Reuters reported earlier this month.

The $2 billion factory, Tesla’s first in China, marks a major bet by the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) maker as it looks to bolster its presence in the world’s biggest auto market where it faces rising competition from a swathe of domestic EV makers and its earnings have been hit by increased tariffs on U.S. imports.
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Retail sales in the U.S. for the 2018 holiday season were up more than 5 percent to more than $850 billion, according to data Mastercard released Wednesday, making 2018 the best holiday retail season in the last six years.

The Mastercard SpendingPulse report tracks retail spending across all payment types, including cash and checks, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 24.

The report said online sales also jumped more than 19 percent from last year.

Clothing and home improvement items were the seasonal favorite, while the sale of electronics fell.

The National Retail Federation had predicted holiday sales to increase between 4.3 and 4.8 percent from 2017, for a total of $717.45 billion to $720.89 billion.

Online giant Amazon said 2018 was a record year for its global holiday sales. Amazon said it shipped a billion products for free in the U.S. alone for its Amazon Prime customers.
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A U.S. trade delegation will go to China the week of Jan. 7, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

It will be the first time the two sides will meet face to face since U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s Xi Jinping agreed to de-escalate a trade war during a meeting in Argentina on Dec. 1.

The U.S. team will be led by Deputy Trade Representative Jeffrey Gerrish and will include David Malpass, Treasury undersecretary for international affairs, Bloomberg said. 

For months, the U.S. and China have engaged in tit-for-tat increases in tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of exports flowing between the two countries. 

At the meeting in Buenos Aires, the two leaders agreed to a 90-day truce in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

Trump also agreed to leave the tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese products at 10 percent, and not raise them to 25 percent on Jan. 1 as he had threatened.

Trump said his agreement with Xi would go down “as one of the largest deals ever made. … And it’ll have an incredibly positive impact on farming, meaning agriculture, industrial products, computers — every type of product.”

Trump and Xi also agreed to immediately begin negotiations on structural changes with respect to forced technology transfer, intellectual property protection, nontariff barriers, cyber intrusions and cyber theft, services and agriculture. 

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, who was put in charge of the China talks, said the negotiations would not be extended beyond the 90-day deadline. He said that March 1 was a “hard deadline” that was endorsed by Trump, Bloomberg reported.

Lighthizer will not be part of the team going to Beijing.
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Wall Street notched its best day in 10 years as stocks rallied back Wednesday, giving some post-Christmas hope to a market that has otherwise been battered this December.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1,000 points — its biggest point-gain ever — rising nearly 5 percent as investors returned from a holiday break. The benchmark S&P 500 index also gained 5 percent and the technology heavy Nasdaq rose 5.8 percent.

But even with the rally, the market remains on track for its worst December since 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression, and to finish 2018 with its steepest losses in a decade.

Technology companies, health care stocks, banks drove much of the broad rally. Retailers also were big gainers, as traders cheered a healthy holiday shopping season marked by robust consumer spending. Amazon had its biggest gain in more than a year.

But what really might have pushed stocks over the top was a signal from Washington that President Donald Trump would not try to oust the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

On Monday, Trump tweeted another critical volley about the central bank’s policy, rattling markets over the possibility the White House might interfere with the traditionally independent Federal Reserve. But in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published Wednesday, a White House economic adviser said that Fed chairman Jerome Powell is in no danger of being fired.

Energy stock jump

Energy stocks also rebounded as the price of U.S. crude oil notched its biggest one-day gain in more than two years.

All told, the S&P 500 index rose 116.60 points, or 5 percent, to 2,467.70. The Dow soared 1,086.25 points, or 5 percent, to 22,878.45. The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 361.44 points, or 5.8 percent, to 6,554.36. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks picked up 62.89 points, or 5 percent, 1,329.81.

Trading volume was lighter than usual following the Christmas holiday. Markets in Europe, Hong Kong and Australia were closed.

“The real question is do we have follow-through for the rest of this week,” said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist for CFRA.

Wednesday’s gains pulled the S&P 500 back from the brink of what Wall Street calls a bear market — a 20 percent tumble from an index’s peak. A further stumble would have marked the end to the longest bull market for stocks in modern history after nearly 10 years. The index is now down 15.8 percent since its all-time high September 20.

Powell’s position is safe

Stocks fell sharply Monday after Trump lashed out at the central bank. Administration officials had spent the weekend trying to assure financial markets that Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s job was safe. On Tuesday, Trump reiterated his view that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates too fast, but called the independent agency’s rate hikes a “form of safety” for an economy doing well.

On Wednesday, Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, weighed in, saying Powell is in no danger of being fired, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The lackluster finish to 2018 comes as most economists expect growth to slow in 2019, though not by enough to slide into a full-blown recession. Many economic barometers still look encouraging. Unemployment is at 3.7 percent, the lowest since 1969. Inflation is tame. Pay growth has picked up. Consumers boosted their spending this holiday season.

Even so, traders have been jittery this autumn over signs that the global economy is slowing, the escalating U.S. trade dispute with China and another interest rate increase by the Fed. Many investors are growing worried that corporate profits — which drive stock market gains — are poised to weaken.

Thumps need a ‘vacation’

Some of what Wall Street sees coming out of the White House has added to the market’s uncertainty, specifically the president’s attacks on the Fed and remarks about the ongoing trade conflict with China.

The president could help restore some stability to the market if he “gives his thumbs a vacation,” Stovall said.

“Tweet things that are more constructive in terms of working out an agreement with Democrats and with China. And then just remain silent as it relates to the Fed,” Stovall said.

The partial U.S. government shutdown that started Saturday is unlikely to hurt the economy much, although it may deprive the financial markets of data about international trade and gross domestic product. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said Wednesday that it’s required to suspend all operations until Congress approves funding, which means that the government might not release its fourth-quarter report on gross domestic product as scheduled for January 30.

Technology stocks accounted for much of Monday’s early bounce. Adobe rose 8.7 percent to $222.95. Payment processors Visa and Mastercard also headed higher. Visa added 7 percent to $130.23, while Mastercard gained 6.7 percent to $186.43.

Big retailers were among the gainers. Amazon climbed 9.4 percent to $1,470.90. Kohl’s gained 10.3 percent to $65.92. Nordstrom picked up 5.8 percent to $46.75.

Homebuilders mostly rebounded after an early slide following a report indicating that annual U.S. home price growth slowed in October. PulteGroup climbed 4.7 percent to $25.85.

U.S. crude climbs

Benchmark U.S. crude climbed 8.7 percent to settle at $46.22 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, gained 7.9 percent to $54.47 a barrel in London.

The pickup in oil prices helped boost energy stocks. Marathon Petroleum rose 4.8 percent to $56.93.

Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.79 percent from 2.75 percent late Monday.

The dollar strengthened to 111.36 yen from 110.41 yen on Monday. The euro weakened to $1.1351 from $1.1404.

Gold edged up 0.1 percent to $1,273 an ounce and silver gained 2 percent to $15.12 an ounce. Copper gained 1.5 percent to $2.70 a pound.

Around the world

In other trading Wednesday, South Korea’s Kospi gave up 1.3 percent, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 index, which plunged 5 percent on Tuesday, picked up 0.9 percent. Shares fell in Taiwan, Singapore and Indonesia, but rose in Thailand.
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Farmers in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh are getting back land that was taken from them more than a decade ago by the government because it was not used, a rare move in a country riven by conflict over land.

Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel of the Congress Party, which won a state election earlier this month with pledges to honor land rights, said he has asked officials to return about 2,000 hectares (7.7 square miles) in Bastar district.

“The process of returning the land will start soon,” Baghel said in a statement earlier this week, without giving details.

Return of land is rare in India, where conflicts have risen as highways and factories are built in one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

About 660 disputes over land have stalled hundreds of projects and forced millions of people from their farms across India, according to research organization Land Conflict Watch.

Chhattisgarh, under the earlier Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, agreed in 2005 to allocate land for a Tata Steel factory in Bastar. Farmers protested giving up their land.

Tata Steel, among the world’s top producers, pulled out of the project in 2016, citing delays.

Authorities said then the land would go into a land bank for other developments to generate jobs in one of India’s poorest states.

“The farmers who lost their land have suffered for years, and struggled to make a living,” said Kishore Narayan, a lawyer with advocacy Human Rights Law Network in Chhattisgarh.

“We hope that the state will look into all cases of lands lying idle and return them,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday.

India has enacted numerous laws to protect the rights of farmers.

A 2013 federal land acquisition law, passed by the Congress government, made consent of farmers mandatory, and introduced adequate compensation and resettlement for those affected.

Any unutilized land is to be returned to owners after five years, or go into the state land bank.

In 2016, the Supreme Court ordered West Bengal state to return land that had been acquired for a Tata Motors factory but was not used, after a decade-long fight by farmers.

Last year, South Korean steelmaker POSCO asked Odisha state to take back land allotted to it for a long-delayed steel project and return it to villagers, although authorities said the land will revert to the state.

Also last year, the Supreme Court heard a petition by an advocacy group, which said about 80 percent of land acquired for large industrial zones was lying idle.

Land rights have come to the fore in recent state elections, and could hurt Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party in an upcoming national election, as farmers make up a big voting bloc, analysts say.
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Saul Ronaldo Atiliano was diving for lobster in the clear waters off Honduras’ Caribbean coast when he felt a pressure, a pain in his body. And he knew he’d gotten the sickness that has killed or disabled so many of his Miskito comrades.

“The pressure attacked me deep in the water,” said Atiliano, a 45-year-old Miskito who for 25 years has dived for lobster, most of which winds up is exported to the United States.

Thousands of men across the Mosquitia region of Honduras and Nicaragua depend on lobster fishing to eke out a living. And like Atiliano, hundreds have been stricken with the bends — decompression sickness caused when nitrogen bubbles form in divers’ bodies. Some are paralyzed. Some are killed.

With more than 60 per cent of its 9 million people living in poverty, Honduras is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, and the Mosquitia is one of the most impoverished areas.

Among exotic, tropical vegetation along the Caribbean coast, the region is sprinkled with small fishing villages where indigenous villagers live in clapboard houses. A sign of the poverty — and also the innocence of childhood — kids play with trucks made of plastic juice boxes with lids for wheels. For many grown-ups, the only option they’ve found to cope with poverty is diving, no matter the risks.

In the Mosquitia, diving permeates everyday life. In the fishing village of Kaukira, worshippers are called to church by the sound of a hammer on a diving tank instead of a bell.

Safe standard diving techniques call for a gradual ascent to the surface to eliminate the nitrogen that the body’s tissues absorb during a dive, and for a limit to the number of dives a person makes in a day.

But many of the divers of Mosquitia dive deeply, surface quickly and then go back for more, racing to collect as much lobster as possible. The boats, where they spend days playing cards and talking among themselves between dives, often have only rudimentary safety equipment and use aging tanks and masks.

Just how many have been stricken is somewhat unclear, though all agree it’s a large number for such small communities.

Jorge Gomez Santos, a former president of the Association of Disabled Honduran Miskito Divers, said this month that at least 2,200 Miskitos now work on the boats, and he said at least 1,300 have been disabled since 1980. Gomez, who uses a wheelchair, said 14 have died this year alone.

A study more than a decade ago cited by the Pan American Health Organization reported there were around 9,000 divers in the Mosquitia, and around 4,200 — 47 percent — were disabled by decompression sickness. Nearly all, it found, had suffered symptoms.

A diver makes 75 lempiras ($3) per pound of lobster and 7 lempiras (28 cents) for each sea cucumber. An average 10-pound (4.5-kilogram) daily haul of lobster is a windfall in one of the most impoverished regions of the Americas, so many take the risk, and many suffer for it, like Atiliano, who dove for 25 years without a problem until that day in September.

The father of 10 was paralyzed on the boat, which didn’t reach the docks for another day and a half. Fellow divers then drove him about 10 blocks to the hospital with a U.S.-donated hyperbaric chamber in city of Puerto Lempira, the area’s largest city.

Decompression sickness is usually treatable with sessions in such high-pressure, oxygen-rich chambers, but there are only a few available along the coast, and divers often must wait several days before they can be treated — reducing the chances of recovery.

“It’s the first accident I’ve had,” Atiliano said, speaking in Miskito through a translator. He appeared exhausted, with a blank stare, after a session of more than three hours in the chamber. He had shown little outward sign of improvement after that early treatment.

Another patient at the chamber was Charles “Charly” Melendez, a 28-year-old Miskito who said he been diving since he was 16 and had harvested 60 pounds of lobster on the day in November 2017 that he was injured.

Even now, after nine sessions, he hasn’t recovered. For a man who always made his living diving, it’s a nightmare being confined to a wheelchair.

“I still can’t stand up by myself,” he said. “I can’t sit for a long time; after an hour my body hurts.”

Cedrack Waldan Mendoza, the physical therapist operating the chamber, said the divers are driven by poverty, and even if injured, return to the boats.

“You run into them in the street and ask them why they’re going (back to diving) and they say it’s because their kids are hungry,” Waldan Mendoza said. “When someone tells you that their kids are hungry there’s no need to ask another question.”

Atiliano and Melendez are among the most vulnerable cogs in the lobster industry, which generated $40 million in sales for Honduras in 2017, nearly all of it from the U.S. market.

Atiliano said he expects to return to sea, not because he wants to, but for lack of options.

“If I recover, by necessity and for lack of work I’ll have to go back to diving,” he said.
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North and South Korea held a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday to mark the start of a joint project to connect railways throughout the divided peninsula. The event was held after both Korea’s inspected railways along the peninsula’s east coast.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Peace and Security Affairs Lee Do-hoon told reporters last week, “The railroad linkage project and related groundbreaking ceremony were given the go-ahead to proceed as scheduled in the working group today,” referring to meetings held with State Department Special Representative for North Korea Policy Stephen Biegun in Seoul.

Jung Dae-jin, a research professor with the Ajou Institute of Unification called the ceremony a strong indicator of both North and South Korea wanting to continue discussions held by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year.

“It looks frozen water from the surface, but the potential of having those conversations is still alive, like the water flowing beneath the ice,” he said.

Jung added that as the North’s rail and roadways are improved, “it can reduce the traveling time which encourages exchanges” between the two governments.

A special train carried 100 South Korean officials, politicians and members of families displaced by the war to the ceremony at Panmun Station in the border city of Kaesong.

In addition to officials from the United Nations, China, Russia, and Mongolia, South Korea’s unification ministry said they were joined by North Korea’s delegation of 100 people.

Following Wednesday’s ceremony, North and South Korea agreed to undertake further railway inspections and work closely with the United States and the United Nations to garner further support for the project and to address sanction concerns.

Railways and sanctions

North Korea’s rail system is said to be antiquated and in desperate need of repair in order to be linked with the South’s. During the first inter-Korean summit in April, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed to “modernize” and “connect” the roads and railways across their border as part of efforts to improve ties and promote development and prosperity.

The railway inspection project had been delayed for months amid concerns about possible violations of UN sanctions on North Korea, but the project was given the go-ahead when the UN Security Council granted a sanctions exemption.

Professor Jung recalls that connecting the North’s and South’s rail lines were part of the 2000 Joint Declaration made by Seoul and Pyongyang and between 2007 and 2008, trains traversed the border several hundred times.

But, “if the extra sanctions are not lifted in the future, the whole plan of modernizing North Korea’s railroad will not be possible too,” he said.

Jung ties the future success of President Moon’s initiatives and plans for the connected railway to North Korea’s denuclearization.

“We need to see the New Year’s address by Kim Jong Un,” he said and notes that it is necessary that the global community see concrete measures taken by Pyongyang toward denuclearization for the process of rail and roadway use to proceed.

Lee Ju-Hyun contributed to this report.

 
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