{"id":133,"date":"2014-12-03T15:11:54","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T15:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/arcticincontext.com\/?p=133"},"modified":"2021-07-12T02:20:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-12T02:20:01","slug":"the-arctic-trading-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/2014\/12\/03\/the-arctic-trading-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"The Arctic Trading Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Mia Bennett<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mirny, a city known for its diamond mine, is located in Sakha Republic in the Russian Far East (RFE). This area of North Asia is full of resources like oil, gas, and minerals, but has only about 6.3 million people spread out across its\u00a0entire area. More than half of the population is concentrated in Primorsky Krai and Khabarovsk Krai on the Sea of Japan.<\/p>\n

The RFE plays an important role in the Arctic for several reasons. There is a long history of ties between certain indigenous peoples in the RFE and Alaska. The Yupik peoples, for instance, lived on both sides of the Bering Strait in Chukotka and Alaska, only to be separated for decades by the so-called \u201cice curtain\u201d of the Cold War, explained in 1995 by Schweitzer and Golovko in a paper entitled \u201cTraveling Between Continents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In terms of economics and transportation, the RFE is also important within the wider Arctic because its coastline\u00a0forms the eastern half of the Northern Sea Route. Though the main rivers leading from inland eastern Siberia to the coast are often impassable, it is conceivable that the region\u2019s\u00a0natural resources could one day make it out to sea in significant amounts. The Kremlin is aware of the need to develop the transportation network. In\u00a02012, Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council,\u00a0observed<\/a>, \u201c\u2018The state of the Urals, Siberia and Far East river transport is well below the demand from the region.\u201d Given the requisite environmental conditions and infrastructure, Siberian\u00a0resources\u00a0could be shipped onward to Asia or Europe from\u00a0ports such as Tiksi (Sakha), Pevek (Chukotka), and Dikson (Krasnoyarsk) \u2013 all\u00a0key locations along the Arctic shipping lane. Maritime transport is much easier than land-based transport in this part of the world given the sheer lack of roads, especially in northeastern Siberia.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Additionally, there is the port of Vladivostok, a city of 600,000 people in Primorsky Krai in which the Japanese and Koreans have long held influence. Joshua Kucera, however, noted in a\u00a0Slate\u00a0article from 2009<\/a>, \u201cThe most remarkable thing about Vladivostok is how thoroughly Russian it is.\u201d My Russian tutor once told me that Vladivostok was the first city in Russia to receive Japanese cars. In fact, one of the city\u2019s main industries is importing and reselling Japanese automobiles. Today, the\u00a0Eastern Dream<\/em><\/a>\u00a0ferry sails from Vladivostok\u00a0to\u00a0Donghae, Korea and Sakaiminato, Japan.<\/p>\n

Although Vladivostok may appear Russian, it\u2019s obvious we\u2019re not in Moscow anymore. The RFE is thousands of miles away from the Kremlin. Geographically, much of the region is closer<\/a> to the capitals of Ulaanbaatar, Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo than\u00a0Moscow. This proximity to East Asia has sparked fears\u00a0of what the Diplomat blog\u00a0termed\u00a0\u201cChina\u2019s Russian Invasion.<\/a>\u201d More absurdly, it\u2019s led to articles such as \u201cWhy China Will Reclaim Siberia<\/a>\u201d \u2013 even though Chinese civilization\u00a0has never held Siberia in its 5,000 year history. Forbes\u2019 contributor and Russia analyst Mark Adomanis put the kibosh on these headlines by\u00a0arguing<\/a>, \u201cThe Chinese invasion of Siberia is a myth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The picture painted by\u00a0foreign trade presents\u00a0a much more complex story than one of a Chinese takeover. As visible in the map below, based on figures obtained from an\u00a0article on the RFE and China<\/a>\u00a0by Rens Lee for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the four political entities within the RFE that border China \u2013 the Amur Oblast, the Jewish Autonomous Okrug, Khabarovsk Krai, and Primorsky Krai (Primorye) \u2013 all trade more with the Asian giant than any other country.<\/p>\n

Timber is one of the leading exports for all four of these places.\u00a0Allegedly, much of this timber, which is in some cases\u00a0illegally harvested<\/a>, goes to Chinese furniture factories, which then re-export the secondary products to the U.S. and Europe. In return, all sorts of goods made in China, like electronics and clothes, are imported. Sakhalin and Kamchatka, astride\u00a0the Sea of Okhotsk, trade more with South Korea than any other country. Sakhalin exports\u00a0oil and gas south, while Kamchatka exports\u00a0seafood.\u00a0Chukotka, across the Bering Strait from Alaska, trades the most with the U.S. The trade balance is rather uneven, with Russia\u2019s easternmost okrug\u00a0importing construction materials, food, and machinery and exporting little in return.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Soviet apartment blocks in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky,\u00a0<\/em>Kamchatka, Russia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In all of these cases, then, trade ties seem to reflect geography \u2013 though counter-intuitively, despite its nearness to the region, Japan is not the top trade partner for any area within the RFE. Top trade partners of the Sakha Republic and Magadan Oblast are also surprising. As I explained in my\u00a0previous post<\/a>, Sakha\u2019s main export is diamonds.\u00a0Those diamonds are produced by the Russian state-owned company Alrosa, which in 2012 signed a supply deal with Belgium\u2019s Laurelton Diamonds. A report from the\u00a0Antwerp World Diamond Centre<\/a>\u00a0explains that in 2012, Russia supplied 20 percent of Antwerp\u2019s imports of rough diamonds. Since 99 percent of Russia\u2019s diamonds come from Sakha, it\u2019s basically Sakha that is supplying Belgium \u2013 and that exchange comes out in the map below, in which Belgium is shown to be Sakha\u2019s most important trade partner.<\/p>\n

Magadan Oblast\u2019s top trade partner is the United Kingdom.\u00a0Russia Today<\/a>\u00a0called the oblast \u201cRussia\u2019s El Dorado\u201d because of its wealth of gold deposits. While specifics about exports to the U.K. are hard to come by, Magadan\u2019s main industries are mining and fishing, so it\u2019s probably gold, rather than seaweed, that is making its way to the British Isles.<\/p>\n

As Antwerp is for diamonds, London is the world\u2019s gold trading hub. Singapore, however, announced this year that it seeks to become a\u00a0gold trading hub<\/a>. This could mean yet another Asian country will soon come knocking on the doors of the Russian Far East \u2013 but an invasion it is not.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

Mia Bennett is a Ph.D. student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at UCLA and runs the Cryopolitics blog<\/a>. She received her M.Phil. in Polar Studies from Cambridge University.<\/em><\/p>\n

[Photo courtesy of Wikipedia<\/a>,\u00a0Flickr\/Austronesian Expeditions<\/a>,\u00a0and Mia Bennett]<\/p>\n

This article first appeared on the World Policy Institute website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Mia Bennett Mirny, a city known for its diamond mine, is located in Sakha Republic in the Russian Far East (RFE). This area of North Asia is full of resources like oil, gas, and minerals, but has only about 6.3 million people spread out across its\u00a0entire area. More than half of the population is<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,7],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economic-development","tag-russia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1816,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/1816"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsis.washington.edu\/aic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}