North Korea's mineral reserves

Here's an interesting article detailing the vast amounts of valuable raw minerals that North Korea is sitting on although I disagree with the term stockpile.  A stockpile is usually used in the sense that they've mined the minerals and is holding them somewhere ready to offload.

North Korea isn't holding them anywhere, they just can't (or maybe isn't willing) afford the infrastructure needed to mine the various minerals.

Even if they could, they'd have trouble selling the minerals on the open market at their true value.

The biggest thing I take away from the article is not what the author is trying to relay, rather it's the arrogance that minerals in the ground somehow 'belong' on the open market and North Korea is somehow depriving the world of a valuable minerals.

Like it or not, North Korea (or at least it's leader) are choosing what to do with the country and are choosing not to pursue mining.  Perhaps if the country were desperate enough, they'd come to the world table and broker a deal, but right now it is their RIGHT to choose not to tap into those resources.

Let me put this another way.  Uluru (Ayers Rock) is predominately made up of iron ore.  As it currently stands, it brings in more money as a tourist destination than it would being mined for it's contents.  You can only mine it once for what would be a pretty small payday, but tourists could probably come for another 100 years just to see it.  More important than the tourist element, Uluru has a cultural significance to the Indigenous population of the country, so any business case to mine it would be very quickly shut down for both Cultural and Tourism reasons.

Let's imagine, for a minute, that those mountains in North Korea aren't just a resource parking lot, that they have been part of the country as long as time and there's possibly even ancient stories about them passed on from generation to generation.  We don't really know because we're only being told one angle.

The current leader may be thinking that in 50 years time his country will be the only untouched region of the world with such untouched beauty, which would make a much better tourist attraction than lining the vaults of the country with money for a finite time.  Maybe North Korea's Great Leader has a longer-term vision than most Westerners, who only think as far as next year (some only as far as next weekend).

The leaders of North Korea might really want to tap into them, but feel that they'd compromise on their personal beliefs, either culturally or simply because they don't trust big world governments not to take advantage of them.  In this regard, can we blame them after all the accusations against the Clinton Foundation for helping to set up the fleecing of Haiti's gold (and possible child trafficking) whilst on a supposed mercy mission after a major earthquake.

I'm not a Greenie, but if a mining site on a potentially culturally significant site were being pushed on a region for profit anywhere else in the world, there'd be outrage, but since it's from a country people deem as despotic, it's apparently ok?

I say if the leaders of North Korea choose not to tap into those minerals FOR ANY REASON, then that's their decision and it should be respected.