Tightened smuggling enforcement along North Korea’s border with China has wiped out a key source of income for border communities in November 2026. The herb smuggling crackdown has ruined once-wealthy traders and pushed families who lived off medicinal herb sales onto tiny mountain farm plots.
A woman in her 50s in Kim Jong Suk County, Ryanggang province, attempted to take her own life on Nov. 3, a local source told Daily NK. Neighbors found her in time, and she narrowly survived the attempt.
She had once made a fortune through smuggling, and locals counted her among the area’s donju. The term refers to the newly wealthy private entrepreneurs who bankroll much of North Korea’s unofficial trade with China. Kim Jong Suk county, named after Kim Jong Il’s mother, sits along the upper Yalu River across from China’s Jilin province.
Her downfall began two years ago, when she was caught trying to smuggle minerals to a Chinese trading partner. The minerals were hidden in a larger shipment of medicinal herbs and pine nuts bound for China. To make the case disappear, she paid an official on the county party committee 10,000 Chinese yuan (about $1,400).
By then, however, two security agencies had already opened a full investigation into the shipment. They were the Ministry of Social Security, North Korea’s police force, and the National Intelligence Agency, formerly the Ministry of State Security. She could neither quash the case nor recover the money she had handed over.
“If she had worked things out properly with customs, that shipment could have gone through for around 1,000 yuan,” the source said. “But she got unlucky, was caught smuggling it and lost her entire stake in one go.”
She tried everything she could to recoup her losses, but failed again and again. By last year she could barely put food on the table, so she began clearing a small mountain plot to grow her own crops. Even that was not enough to keep her afloat, and she has struggled with severe hardship ever since.
Herb smuggling chain breaks down along the Yalu River
Her case is far from the only one in the region hit by North Korea’s smuggling crackdown. For generations, villagers along the Yalu River have gathered wild medicinal herbs and sold them to middlemen. They used the proceeds to buy food and daily necessities for their families.
The middlemen added a markup and resold the herbs to donju with deeper pockets. Herbs are normally shipped to China in lots of at least one metric ton. To reach that volume, donju pooled supplies from several middlemen or teamed up with other donju to combine their stock.
That tightly linked chain has now snapped as North Korean authorities close off the old sales routes. With herbs increasingly hard to move into China through unofficial channels, the middlemen have disappeared from border villages.
According to the source, donju with capital left over can afford to wait until smuggling resumes. Ordinary families who sold herbs to buy food as they went, however, have been pushed to the brink almost overnight.
To survive, many of these border households are turning to small-plot farming, which requires almost no startup money. “If you talk things over well with the forest rangers, you can sometimes get a good spot,” the source said. Forest rangers are local officials who patrol state forests and police unauthorized land clearing.
Such deals matter because Kim Jong Un’s government has spent years reclaiming hillside plots for its reforestation campaign. Much of that mountain land is now officially off-limits to individual farmers in border areas.
“With no way left to earn money selling herbs, people are barely getting by on what they harvest from their plots,” the source said. “Unless smuggling resumes, food shortages among the people at the very bottom are unlikely to ease.”
This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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