African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 908 Chapter Sustainable Development

Resource-intensive industries can also be called land-intensive industries. Obviously, this industry type involves industries that rely on land and related resources, and the most typical ones are agriculture and mining.

East Africa is a typical agricultural and mining country. Needless to say about agriculture, the mining industry has expanded rapidly with the expansion of East Africa's land area. Especially in the central and southern regions of East Africa, a large number of cities have emerged due to mineral resources.

With the development of economic cooperation with Germany and Austria, the export volume of mineral resources in East Africa has also begun to increase year by year. However, agriculture is okay. Because of the backwardness of East Africa's chemical industry, agriculture is still dominated by organic agriculture, and the development of mineral resources has a negative impact on land. The pollution of rivers is quite serious.

Take the city of Kabwe as an example. Don’t underestimate Kabwe as just an unknown city. In fact, in its previous life, Kabwe was one of the ten most polluted cities in the world.

The dominant minerals in Kabwe City are lead and zinc. During the mining process, they will cause serious heavy metal pollution, which is almost irreversible. However, human demand for lead and zinc is indispensable, so companies like Kabwe City This lead and zinc production area cannot be directly stagnated in East Africa. Instead, production must be increased to meet the needs of electric power, military industry, metallurgy, chemical industry and other industries.

"Our government cannot turn a blind eye to the prevention and control of industrial pollution and blindly pursue production efficiency while ignoring environmental problems, especially those in inland areas." Ernst emphasized at the government meeting.

"The development of mineral resources will produce a large amount of pollution, which in order are solid, liquid and gas."

"It is true that gas pollution prevention and control is difficult to solve, but solid and liquid pollution problems must be solved smoothly. After all, the mining industry produces a large amount of slag and harmful substances during resource development, which is the most serious pollution to land and rivers."

"This is even more important than agriculture. Although agriculture also has a great impact on ecology, agriculture itself is part of the ecosystem and has a substitution effect. The impact of mining on ecology is almost negative. If we do not pay attention to this issue, then Fifty or sixty years later, many cities are now in decline either due to resource depletion or ecological problems.”

"Of course, it doesn't sound very serious. After all, cities can be redeveloped and rise when they decline. But the accompanying pollution of land and rivers is completely different. These cities and surrounding areas will become the future of East Africa. Scars on the ground that won’t heal.”

"Although East Africa's land resources are rich, they are limited. This is true for any country and region in the world. For example, if the land around the Nile River cannot survive due to pollution, then the country of Egypt will basically exist in name only."

"Of course, we in East Africa cannot compare with Egypt. The little land that can be developed in Egypt cannot even be compared with the Northern Province in East Africa. But for the same reason, the scale of our industry is not comparable to that of Egypt."

After all, environmental management is similar to the sanitation of a room. Every day, the owner of the room will produce all kinds of domestic garbage. The diligent people will clean up the garbage every time and throw it into the trash can downstairs every day, while the sloppy people will I kept accumulating it until I couldn’t hold it anymore, and then I started to clear it out.

Ernst couldn't tell the pros and cons of the two models. After all, the rooms will all be clean in the end. It's just that the diligent people live in a clean house every day, while the sloppy people "endure it for a while" before cleaning. .

The main purpose of this meeting is actually the management of waste slag and waste rock. The method is not difficult. To sum up, it is centralized storage. These four words.

The first thing to consider must be to stay away from rivers and cultivated land, followed by residential areas, in areas that are difficult to use and will not have a serious impact on the ecology.

Moreover, slag may not have secondary use value. Mineral smelting technology in the 19th century was quite backward. Perhaps there are resources in the abandoned slag that have not been extracted, and they may be reused after technological advancement in the future.

After talking about the mining industry, the topic returns to agriculture, a resource-intensive industry. In the final analysis, agriculture has the greatest impact and coverage. After all, mineral resources with economic value are not found everywhere, but agriculture is everywhere, even in Deserts can also develop some special small-scale agriculture.

For agriculture, it is a commonplace issue, including water system management, farmland development, and market connection. As the saying goes, cheap grain hurts farmers, but this may not be the case in East Africa. Because of collective farming, national assets are damaged. Therefore, agricultural development must naturally meet the needs of the international market, and this is inseparable from mechanization, crop selection, chemical fertilizers and aspects of pesticide production.

The general direction of mechanization has long been determined, and the selection of crops will naturally give priority to the transition to cash crop cultivation, with the focus on the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

With the development of economic cooperation between East Africa and Germany, Austria and other countries, the development trend of the chemical industry in East Africa has become clear, but the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides must be cautious.

Ernst is naturally not a tout of "green agriculture" in Africa in his previous life. Fertilizers, pesticides and other magic weapons to increase production should still be used. Not only that, East Africa also needs to vigorously develop "agricultural genetic engineering."

However, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, especially pesticides, obviously cannot be blind. In this regard, Ernst proposed three key principles: "safety, sustainability, and reasonable dosage."

Some pesticides are not just pesticides, they may also threaten people. After all, countries were not strict about these pesticides in the 19th century.

All of this naturally requires East African scientific researchers to conduct experiments first, determine the side effects, and then selectively promote it on a large scale.

If there is less pollution, there will be less pollution. In this way, although East Africa will do more things than other countries, it will have little impact on the overall economy of East Africa.

Pollution is yours, just like health is yours. The capitalists ran away. In the future, governments will still have to work hard to rectify environmental problems. No one can escape this difficulty.

And East Africa needs to pay more attention to this point. East Africa is one of the countries with the largest non-ferrous metal reserves in the world. Mineral resources are still concentrated in inland areas, so environmental issues cannot be taken lightly.

Pollution in coastal areas will drift to other sea areas along the ocean currents. Even because of the issue of maritime sovereignty, if you don't pollute, other countries will also pollute.

Obviously, the country that will pollute the Indian Ocean the most in the future will be India, so Ernst dumped garbage into the sea without any psychological burden.

As the conference concluded, East African governments began a new round of work, particularly on the re-planning and management of mines and ore refineries.

The key point is the storage and management of slag and the protection of the river environment in the mining area. This is actually very easy. After the slag storage is solved, the pollution of the river will basically be reduced. Unless it is some liquid pollution source, there is no way. .

Cities with some conditions can only simply sediment and filter polluted water bodies before discharging them into rivers, lakes and seas. However, this also greatly reduces the pressure on East Africa's inland rivers.

This series of work does bring some troubles to the industrial and agricultural production in East Africa, but it is not a big problem. After all, the economic main body in East Africa is public ownership. If it is a private enterprise, it may have complaints. After all, it needs to arrange more manpower and increase production processes. For East African companies, it is natural to do whatever the government says, and there is no problem with execution.

(End of this chapter)