Sindo, Environment and the Politics of Fishing in North Korea

Abstract

Sindo island is in the mouth of the Amnok (Yalu in Chinese) River at the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China. Reclaimed from the estuary of the river in 1971, a cooperative of fisher people from older fishing communities and enterprises along the western coast of North Korea was created to serve as a model community and model example of development at this time. Kim Il Sung himself made repeated visits between 1971 and 1976, during a period when North Korean politics sought to reconfigure landscape and developmental possibility through a series of what are called ‘Great Nature Remaking Projects’. North Korea’s fishing industry was to be reconfigured so as to focus on resources further out to sea, fishing practice and knowledge was to be further developed and a series of cooperatives were to be the institutional basis for the sector. By the 1990s, fishing cooperatives such as Sindo had been forgotten in the collapse of North Korean capability and bureaucracy and in the 2000s, the fishing industry has been co-opted by the Korean Peoples’ Army and a network of fishery stations dedicated to industrial fishing and resource production built. This meant that Sindo became even more peripheral to the political and institutional mind. This chapter explores this history, context and strategies the fisherpeople of Sindo might use to maintain their livelihoods and connections to the vibrant and lively fishing matters that once sustained and gave impetus to them. In Sindo and in other places within North Korea are fishing matters as vibrant and energetic as local political sensibility and aspiration are lively?