President Lee Jae-myung will meet the leaders of five Central Asian countries over three days starting on the 14th, beginning with talks with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. These countries are rich in minerals and energy, making the trip effectively a "resource diplomacy week" for South Korea. On the 16th, the first Korea-Central Asia multilateral summit will also be held, upgrading to the leaders' level a ministerial cooperation forum that has been running since 2007. The government plans to diversify supply chains by combining Central Asian resources with Korean exploration and processing technology.
Central Asia is a strategic pivot for spreading out imports of critical minerals and energy that are now concentrated in China and the Middle East. It is an urgent region for securing resources that are a lifeline for the Korean economy and national security. South Korea depends on overseas imports, including from China, for more than 90% of the 33 critical minerals designated by the government. Under these conditions, Chinese control over resources can only erode the competitiveness of semiconductors, batteries and robotics, which are core Korean industries.
The government should treat these talks as a turning point for strengthening its capacity to develop resources abroad. South Korea pushed aggressively into overseas resource development under the Lee Myung-bak administration, but the Park Geun-hye and Moon Jae-in administrations used poor investments in some projects as a pretext to cast the entire effort as a legacy of corruption and mismanagement. Related projects were sold off at knockdown prices or halted. As a result, Japan's self-sufficiency rate for oil, natural gas and minerals secured at home and abroad reaches 40%, while Korea's stands at just 10%. The Lee Jae-myung administration has begun summit diplomacy to build a resource security network, but there is still a long way to go.
With oil prices surging as the Middle East war drags on and the weaponization of resources intensifying, Korea's only survival strategy is to widen its import sources and its resource territory overseas. The success or failure of resource diplomacy is decided not by the number of memorandums of understanding but by actual development projects and long-term supply contracts. Previous administrations signed many agreements as well, but in numerous cases failed to carry them through to follow-up projects. That happened because projects requiring more than a decade were rushed to fit the results of a five-year term, or because policies were reversed whenever the government changed. This "resource diplomacy week" should become a new starting point for resource development, carried through with persistence from feasibility screening to development and imports. What is needed is an overseas resource development strategy that does not waver with each change of government.
