POOR LITTLE RICH LAND

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 5, 9 October 1950, Page 6

POOR LITTLE RICH LAND

The Korean Peninsula’s strategic mineral reserves, largest in the Far East outside Manchuria, have received little attention in the various estimates of long-range Communist strategy in the Orient. Embattled Korea has valuable deposits of some 200 minerals and about five-sixths of the mining production is in North Korea, which has most of the underground wealth, but several of the most important metals are found in quantity only in the South.

The southern part of the. Peninsula, for example, has produced all the cobalt and manganese, more than half the Tungsten, and nearly all the Molydenum, a steel hardening ingredient known to be in short supply behind the Iron Curtain. In general, Korean resources are more important for their variety than quantity. Coal, iron, gold, nickel, zinc, magnesite, graphite, lead, titanium, and phosphate are only a few in a long list. Before the last war,- Korea produced about one-third of the world’s graphite, important in the electrical industry. The deposits of bartite, with many industrial applications, are among the best in the world. The value of gold production has been as high as £22,321,428 a year. Coal reserves are well over 1,500,000,000 tons. Iron ore has been estimated at more than 1,000,000.000 tons, although only part of it has a high iron content. The possibilities of this “poor little rich land” are often overlooked because of its strife-ridden history, but before ahe outbreak of the present fighting, Korea’s industry was believed to be larger than that of either Mexico or Turkey. The Peninsula’s hydro-electric potential has been estimated by survey at five million kilowatts, which .vould exceed the 1937 electrical output of either Italy or France. Ports, as well as mineral riches, make Korea a desirable prize. The Peninsula has ten major all-weather ports, 29 secondary ones, and an additional 139 off-shore anchorages Around the nation’s 11,000-miles coastline, where warm and cold currents meet, are found 75 kinds of edible fish. The N sea outlets, therefore, are important to commercial fisheries, an industry in which Korea ranked third among the nations of the world in 1939. Korea’s best farming lands and most of .the rice-grow-ing areas are in the south. A decade ago Korea was the world’? fourth largest rice producer-