North Korea has been importing a large amount of bear bile, used in traditional Asian remedies, from China for key officials of the ruling Workers' Party, a media report said Wednesday, citing testimonies by defectors.

A defector, who was not named, told Radio Free Asia that there is a flow of bear gallbladders into North Korea from China.

The source said transactions generally take place in China's border city of Suifenhe in Heilongjiang Province.

RFA said that gallbladder trade is able to be conducted given the lax oversight of the Chinese customs authorities in the border city.

Suifenhe is known to be a city where North Korea used to purchase Russian weapons through the black market in the past.

The defector said North Korea had some bear-breeding farms until early 2000, but they have now disappeared.

Another North Korean who escaped the country and now lives in South Korea told RFA that North Korea has been importing quite a large number of bear gallbladders from China because the Asian black bear population in the reclusive country has been gradually vanishing due to deforestation and other reasons.

He also said some of the North Korean laborers in Russia bring in gallbladders when they come back from Russia and give them to party officials as gifts or bribes.

RFA then highlighted a recent report posted on a Chinese internet media that claimed North Korea passed down the know-how of extracting bile from live bears in 1983.

Bile bears are bears kept in captivity and harvested for their bile, a digestive fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gallbladder, which is used by some traditional Chinese medicine practitioners.

In East Asia, bears are often kept in captivity and farmed for their gallbladders and the bile inside. It has been estimated that as many as 12,000 bears are farmed this way across the region. (Yonhap)