WHY THE SUDDEN INTEREST IN NORTH KOREA?
MAYBE BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE LARGEST DEPOSIT OF RARE EARTHS?
The development of the North Korea issue over the past few months puzzled me. Why suddenly the saber rattling and the threats? Why the talks about military options? Why is China suddenly so keen on showing them who's boss? So I started to dig around and found this press release from 3 years ago of a company called SRE Minerals. They claim that during explorations in North Korea they found the biggest deposit of rare earth metals on the planet. The deposit is twice as big as all other known deposits combined. Some other articles (can't be archived properly) picked it up too:
miningweekly.com/article/largest-known-rare-earth-mineral-deposit-discovered-2013-12-04
mining.com/largest-known-rare-earth-deposit-discovered-in-north-korea-86139/
archive.is
Looking at the chart of rare earth prices one can see they have increased dramatically over the past 15 years. Prices went only down in 2014 after China eased on it's export restrictions. China controls about 90% of rare earth elements production. It's save to say that the demand of rare earth elements will increase in the future as they are needed for batteries and electronics. Taking future demand, current prices and the size of the deposit into consideration we could look at a value of about $100 trillion dollars over the next 50-80 years. This could transform North Korea into a petrostate-type country.
A 25 year joint venture between SRE and North Korea has been signed to develop the deposit. In October 2014, Russia agreed to invest $25 million towards upgrading the North Korean railway system in exchange for access to regions containing mineral reserves. So things are already moving forward which could mean that in the near future the REE dollars will start pouring in. I could imagine that the US, China, Japan and the other neighboring countries wouldn't be very happy if NK could acquire better military tech with all those dollars. I know there are sanctions in place but we all know if the money is just right, those can and will be circumvented. Also China can't be to happy to suddenly lose the grip on a very important market.
Wouldn't this be a good time to install a new (((democratic))) regime before they use this new money to upgrade their military? Also wouldn't it be nice if (((foreign corporations))) were allowed to participate (euphemism for plunder) these newfound resources? What you you think?