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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

> To trace the importation of seafood from factories that appear to be using North Korean labor, my team reviewed trade data, shipping contracts, and the codes that are stamped on seafood packages to monitor food safety. We found that, since 2017, ten of these plants have together shipped more than a hundred and twenty thousand tons of seafood to more than seventy American importers, which supplied grocery stores including Walmart, Giant, ShopRite, and the online grocer Weee!

How can something like this be allowed into The United States. Are trade sanctions actually bureaucratic yellow tape to get around with middleman shell companies? I am completely disgusted that I may have unknowingly purchased food prepared by a facility as inhumane as this.

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Trade sanctions are actually bureaucratic yellow tape to get around with middleman shell companies. They are at least slightly effective by shifting a fraction of the profits from sanctioned entities to middlemen, so better than nothing. But mostly they allow countries to pretend like they're doing something without actually taking kinetic action.

For example, there are currently a variety of sanctions against the Russian and Iranian petroleum industries. So, they sell at a slight discount to neutral countries such as India which then re-export the "clean" oil.

The purpose of sanctions is to increase friction and make the targeted entity less competitive. Nobody expects that they work perfectly, because there are always strong incentives for bypassing them. But the effects are often very significant in the long term. For example, see the differences between South Korea and North Korea.

Nobody actually wants Russia to stop exporting oil, because they are one of the biggest exporters in the world. World economy would take a huge hit if that much oil disappeared from the market. The purpose of the sanctions is not to prevent Russia from exporting oil, but to reduce the amount of money they get from selling it.

> For example, see the differences between South Korea and North Korea.

This is mostly a doing of the country (or elites) itself. North Korea could be much better (it's actually doing a lot better than many third-world countries despite their backward system) but they choose not to.

> For example, there are currently a variety of sanctions against the Russian and Iranian petroleum industries. So, they sell at a slight discount to neutral countries such as India which then re-export the "clean" oil.

At least for Russian petroleum stuff, it's not as easy. The existing pipeline networks from the oil and gas fields are mostly focused on delivering to Europe due to history (everything east of the former GDR was supplied with gas and oil from Russia), and that is coming to an end rather sooner than later as Germany is building up import capacity from the North Sea and Croatia from the Mediterranean (a new LNG terminal on Krk and the existing oil infrastructure on Omisalj), as well as Ukraine planning to end oil transit in 2025.

Alternative transportation capacity is very very scarce as there are barely any pipelines and Russia doesn't have accessible sea ports in abundance.

> How can something like this be allowed into The United States. Are trade sanctions actually bureaucratic yellow tape to get around with middleman shell companies?

Not just US. Did you know that as soon as Russian sanctions began with the latest war escalation, German exports of chips and machinery to Kyrgyzstan rose 900%?

(I'd be the first to say this sounds like a conspiracy but by now even Reuters reported on it)

Polish imports of wood from Kazakhstan have gone up 50x since the introduction of sanctions on Russia - even though Kazakhstan has close to zero forests and its domestic production of wood has always been very very very low - but suddenly they produce so much wood it almost exactly matches what used to be imported from Russia before. And everyone knows this is a rouse and this is really Russian wood imported into Kazakhstan first, but regulators are either unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

I thought the idea was that we know that sanctions are circumvented this way, but it puts a tax on all dealings.

Russia selling oil to India? It's now part of the world oil market, so decreases demand from India for other nations oil. Effectively they're still selling the same amount of oil, but now they get rupees instead of $, € or ₽.

Russia selling wood through Kazakhstan? Well it's the same wood being sold, but Kazakhstan is getting money out of this somehow. There are people to bribe on the way. There are logistics to be done. They will achieve a lower price on the wood now.

They are getting rupees, dirhams, and ammunition for police (7.62 x 39, 9 x 19)

I guess the point is that it costs more for Russia and others this way. Which seems logical

Problem is, if you sanction all the countries willing to launder for Russia, you'll probably end up with a few Western countries (and not even all of them).

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