Managers at trading companies in Sariwon, North Hwanghae province, recently attended a special lecture on the global economic situation.
According to a Daily NK source in North Hwanghae province recently, about 40 officials from major trading companies listened to a special lecture hosted by the organizational department of Sariwon’s party committee.
The lecture discussed how U.S. trade dominance had thrown the entire global economic order into chaos and how the policies of the anti-immigrant, pro-tariff Trump administration had destabilized trade not only in the United States, China and Europe but around the entire world.
The lecture said Trump’s immigration controls and trade protectionism were “ultimately tearing the spider’s web of the global market.”
“The recent financial instability, spike in transportation costs and raw material imbalances all revealed the weakness of the U.S.-centered economic order,” the source said. “They show that the United States could instantly knock down the trading order built steadily over decades.”
The lecture then highlighted the self-reliance policy as explained by North Korean authorities.
“At this very moment, export-dependent countries can’t ship their goods, can’t make financial payments and are watching their national credit ratings suffer due to unilateral actions by the United States,” the source said, criticizing the dangers of heavy reliance on exports in an unstable global economy.
N. Korea promotes domestic development strategy
“Amid this global chaos, our trade officials must recognize how correct our republic’s self-reliance policy has been, especially our efforts to develop agriculture and regional industries rather than rely solely on trade,” the lecture said.
While describing U.S.-sparked chaos and crises in the global economy, the lecture argued that late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung’s policy to build domestic production, late leader Kim Jong Il’s cultivation of light industries and current leader Kim Jong Un’s strategy to develop nuclear weapons and the economy simultaneously were the right answers for the age.
Adding that current events had again highlighted North Korea’s regional development strategy to improve people’s lives by boosting local economies, the lecture encouraged trade companies in Sariwon to “build production facilities with our own strength and quickly establish systems to process and distribute our region’s agricultural goods and light industrial items rather than rely only on imports and exports.”
The lecture also called for a transition from “trade led by international markets” to “trade that supports the regional economy” through “connections between trading companies, building management structures that circulate resources and strategies to diversify transactions.”
“At the end of the lecture, they called on trade officials, more than ever, to understand the character and changes of the global economy and think deeply about and practice how they can nurture our republic’s philosophy within it,” the source said. “It also predicted that orders would soon come down on working-level training and building self-reliant management in line with party and Cabinet policies.”
