Ivory, rhino horn funding Korean nuke arms race

North Korea has diversified its business model for earning hard currency, shifting from a reliance on manufacturing drugs and counterfeiting foreign banknotes to smuggling products from endangered animal species, fake pharmaceuticals and counterfeit cigarettes.

The details of Pyongyang's methods of earning the money it needs to pay for its nuclear and missile programmes are spelled out in a study released yesterday by the Washington-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.

The report says that Pyongyang has been producing narcotics, smuggling them abroad in diplomatic pouches and printing high-quality foreign currency forgeries since the mid-1970s as part of the Kim regime's "fundamental strategic objective" of self-preservation.

The smuggling by North Korean diplomats of rhino horn and ivory appears to be a relatively recent shift, the report says. A North Korean was arrested in 2012 in Mozambique trying to smuggle 130 pieces of ivory, worth about R540000, out of the country. Seizures in Kenya, Russia and France netted more than 1.8t of ivory.

There has been a notable increase in North Korea's output of fake cigarettes since 2002. A container of fake Marlboros impounded in Singapore followed similar seizures in South Africa, Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines.

North Korean officials were caught in 2004 smuggling 150000 clonazepam sedative tablets into Egypt, and embassy employees from Bulgaria were detained in Turkey carrying 500000 tablets of the synthetic stimulant Captagon, worth an estimated R73.5-million. North Korea has also been accused of making fake Viagra pills.