African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 1255 Forestry Resources
"Integrating local tin resources also includes building smelters, tinplate production plants, power plants and other supporting facilities."

In order to save costs, East Africa will focus on integrating and optimizing the tin ore resources in the Isthmus of Kra, and finally provide refined materials and semi-finished products for East African local industries, reducing intermediate links and transportation costs.

Finkel went on to say: "In terms of cultivating local cash crops, we will focus on developing the local rubber planting industry to replace part of the rubber planting area in our country."

"Other areas will focus on developing other tropical forestry resources, such as fruits, timber and other economic crops suitable for tropical rainforest areas."

It can be seen that East Africa's development plan for the Isthmus of Kra has typical colonial characteristics, whether it is the development of mineral resources or the construction of plantation economy. Its purpose is only one, that is, to turn the area into a raw material supplier for East Africa.

As for the colonial market, this is one of the most scarce things in East Africa. The scale of the colonial market in East Africa is not large. After all, the characteristic of many colonies in East Africa is that they have a small population, and with a small population, the demand is naturally not high.

The East African territory of the Kra Isthmus still needs to clear out more than half of those who cannot be "integrated". When East Africa completes the "surgery" of cutting off the local area, the market size will be even smaller. However, there are gains and losses. The East African government does not lack the market of the Kra Isthmus. After the immigrants arrive, it will not take many years for the local area to recover.

Finkel said: "In addition, we plan to build an oil pipeline and two oil refineries in the area. In addition to economic considerations, there are also energy and national defense strategic factors."

The Isthmus of Kra can be said to be located in a very delicate position. Its west is close to the Tonkin Gulf Territory, and its east is not far from East Kalimantan. Both places are important oil producing areas in East Africa.

Therefore, the greater significance of building an oil refinery locally is to prevent the Malacca Strait from being cut off, so that the oil resources of the two places can still flow smoothly.

It is worth mentioning here that the oil in the Persian Gulf has not yet been developed, so the oil refineries built in East Africa will be concentrated in Songkhla.

In addition to facilitating East Africa to transport oil from East Kalimantan back to its own country, it also facilitates ensuring the fuel supply of the Pacific Fleet in a war situation.

Of course, this premise is that after the oil producing areas in East Kalimantan are occupied by other countries, East Africa loses its oil producing areas in the Pacific region and has to supply materials to the Pacific Fleet from the Indian Ocean.

However, the possibility of this happening is very small. The layout of the oil industry in the Isthmus of Kra is actually related to East Africa's future considerations for oil energy, especially the export of oil from the Persian Gulf to the Far East.

The Far East region here is not limited to the Far East Empire. After all, most countries in the world lack oil resources.

East Africa, which holds many oil-producing colonies such as the Beibu Gulf Territory, is no longer short of oil resources. Therefore, exporting oil to other countries will inevitably become one of East Africa's important economic development methods.

In fact, East Africa is currently the world's largest exporter of refined oil and importer of crude oil. The most typical example is that East Africa imports oil from Russia, Venezuela and other places, and then processes it into gasoline, diesel, kerosene and other refined oils, and then exports them to other parts of the world. Today, the two major camps in Europe are the major buyers of East African refined oil.

After talking about the oil industry, Finkel continued, "We will vigorously develop the forestry resources of the Kra Isthmus, thereby reducing the scale of timber production in the eastern part of our country. We will actively utilize the climate of the Kra Isthmus to build an important forest farm to meet the timber shortage in the relatively fragile climate and ecological areas of our country."

In addition to tin mines, the most valuable asset in the Kra Isthmus Territory is the rich local forest resources, but there is still a relatively large gap in timber in East Africa.

Although East Africa has the world's second largest tropical rainforest, the Congo rainforest, and the forest coverage rate in East Africa is as high as over 50%, it stands to reason that East Africa is not short of wood.

However, forest resources in East Africa are not evenly distributed. They are concentrated in the central and western regions of the country, while the eastern part, except for the former Mozambique and Tanzania regions, is mostly relatively dry.

Therefore, in order to focus on protecting local grasslands or forest resources, it is more cost-effective to import timber from the Nanyang region.

Especially the Kra Isthmus Territory, which is very close to the east coast of East Africa, has a climate suitable for forest production, and is not small in area. Fifty thousand square kilometers of land is indeed not worth mentioning in front of the giant East Africa, but this area is very large in many countries.

Most of these 50,000 square kilometers of land are suitable for developing forestry resources. Even if East Africa builds half of it into forest farms, it will not be a small number.

The local forestry resources will be mainly supplied to Somalia and Kenya in East Africa. There is no need to say much about Somalia, although the Turkana Province next to it is a major forestry output province.

However, land transportation from Turkana to Somalia is not convenient, and the forestry output of Turkana Province mainly comes from the mountains in the southern part of the Ethiopian Plateau, where wood processing and transportation are not convenient.

Although there are some mountains and hills in the Isthmus of Kra territory, the altitudes of these mountains are generally not high, and the plain area of ​​the Isthmus of Kra territory is also not small.

Combined with the cost advantage of sea transportation, it can effectively provide cheap timber supply to the east coast region of East Africa.

Although timber export is a very low-end industry, it does not mean that it is unimportant. On the contrary, it is very important.

Industries such as construction, furniture, moulds, and industrial production are all major consumers of wood. Before the large-scale use of coal, wood was still the most important fuel in the world. Apart from other things, the demand for wood in the furniture industry alone is astonishingly large.

After all, tables, chairs, benches, etc. are basically the basic necessities of life that every household must have, and these are consumables. Although people are still relatively simple and know how to save in this era, that cannot change the fact that furniture products will inevitably become dilapidated over time.

East Africa has a population of more than 100 million, and the annual demand for wood is quite astonishing. Even for a simple product like chopsticks, a lot of forests are cut down every year. Although bamboo products in East Africa are also increasing, the scale of bamboo cultivation in Africa was originally not large, so it is too early to replace wood.

Ernst also said at this time: "Although East Africa is not short of forest resources, we should also note that the rapid development of East Africa in the past few decades has had a negative impact on some ecologically weak areas."

"Especially in the central and eastern parts of our country, the provinces of Orientale, Bohemia, and Lorraine are located at the intersection of grasslands and deserts."

"The destructive development of these areas in the past has caused major problems such as soil erosion and desertification."

"According to the detection data, in the past decade or so, both the Kalahari Desert and the Somali Desert have shown a trend of expansion, posing a threat to some habitable areas in my country."

"Among them, excessive deforestation and grazing are the main factors. Therefore, for the sake of the empire's ecological and environmental issues, we must also make plans in advance, such as setting ecological red lines, especially for ecologically fragile areas to minimize development as much as possible."

"Importing timber and minerals from the colonies can protect our local ecological security to a certain extent."

Of course, Ernst just mentioned that the current mainstream in East Africa is still development-oriented. As for protecting the environment, it will not be too late to change the policy when the environment in East Africa really reaches a big problem.

The fact is that the contradiction between East Africa's ecology and industrial development is still within the controllable range. After all, East Africa has only a few decades of history. Although the population of East Africa has grown to more than 100 million, which is not a small population size, for a long time before the population exceeded 100 million, the population of East Africa remained at tens of millions.

This population size is calculated by including the indigenous people. After all, before East Africa colonized Africa, there were tens of millions of black people living here. Currently, the number of East African citizens has gradually accumulated to more than 100 million.

(End of this chapter)