Chapter 908: Sustainable Development
Resource-intensive industries, also known as land-intensive industries, obviously involve industries that rely on land and related resources, the most typical of which are agriculture and mining.
East Africa is a typical agricultural and mining powerhouse. There is no need to say much 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, where 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 begun to rise year by year. Agriculture is not so bad because of the backwardness of East Africa's chemical industry and agriculture is still mainly organic agriculture. However, the development of mineral resources has caused serious pollution to the land and rivers.
Take the city of Kabwe as an example. Don’t underestimate Kabwe because it is just an unknown city. In fact, in its past life, Kabwe was one of the ten most polluted cities in the world.
Kabwe's advantageous minerals are lead and zinc, which will cause serious heavy metal pollution during the mining process and are almost irreversible. However, human demand for lead and zinc is indispensable, so it is impossible for lead and zinc producing areas like Kabwe to be directly stagnant in East Africa. Instead, production must be increased to meet the needs of industries such as electricity, military industry, metallurgy, and chemical industry.
"Our government cannot turn a blind eye to industrial pollution prevention and control and blindly pursue production efficiency while ignoring environmental problems, especially those in inland areas," Ernst specifically emphasized at the government meeting.
“Mineral resource development will generate a large amount of pollution, which includes solid, liquid and gas in order.”
"It is indeed difficult to prevent and control gas pollution, but the problem of solid and liquid pollution must be solved at the same time. After all, the mining industry produces a large amount of slag and harmful substances in resource development, which are the most serious pollution to land and rivers."
"This is even worse than agriculture. Although agriculture also has a great impact on the ecology, it is itself a part of the ecosystem and has a substitute effect. The impact of mining on the ecology is almost negative. If we do not pay attention to this issue, in 50 or 60 years, many cities will decline directly due to resource depletion or ecological problems."
"Of course, it doesn't sound serious. After all, cities can be redeveloped. What goes down must come up. But the pollution of land and rivers is a completely different matter. These cities and their surrounding areas will become scars on the land of East Africa that are difficult to heal in the future."
"Although East Africa has abundant land resources, they are also limited. This is true for any country or region in the world. For example, if the land around the Nile River becomes uninhabitable due to pollution, then Egypt will basically exist in name only."
"Of course, we in East Africa cannot compare with Egypt. The amount of land that can be developed and utilized in Egypt is not even comparable to that of the Northern Province of East Africa. But by the same token, the scale of our industry is also not comparable to that of Egypt."
After all, environmental management is similar to the hygiene of a room. Every day, the owner of the room generates various household waste. Diligent people will clean up the garbage and throw it into the trash can downstairs every day, while sloppy people will keep accumulating it until there is no more space to store it.
Ernst couldn’t tell the pros and cons of the two models. After all, in the end, both rooms were clean. It’s just that diligent people lived in a clean house every day, while sloppy people had to “endure it for a while” before cleaning up.
The main theme of this meeting is actually the management of waste slag and waste rock. The means are not difficult. To sum it up, it is centralized storage.
The first thing to consider is definitely to stay away from rivers and cultivated land, and the second is to place residential areas in areas that are difficult to exploit and will not cause serious impact on the ecology.
Moreover, slag may not be without secondary utilization value. In the 19th century, mineral smelting technology was quite backward. Perhaps there are unrefined resources in the discarded slag, which may be able to be reused after technological advances in the future.
After talking about the mining industry, the topic returns to agriculture, a resource-intensive industry. Ultimately, agriculture has the greatest impact and coverage area. After all, mineral resources with economic value are not available in every place, but agriculture is everywhere. Even in the desert, some special small-scale agriculture can be developed.
For agriculture, those are the old problems, including water system management, arable land development, and market connection.
As the saying goes, low grain prices hurt farmers, but this is not necessarily the case in East Africa. Because of collective agriculture, it is national assets that are damaged. Therefore, agricultural development must naturally meet the needs of the international market, which in turn requires mechanization, crop selection, and fertilizer and pesticide production.
The general direction of mechanization has long been determined, and crop selection naturally prioritizes the transition to cash crop cultivation, with the focus on the use of fertilizers and pesticides.
With the development of economic cooperation between East Africa and countries such as Germany and Austria, the trend of chemical industry development in East Africa has become clear, but the use of fertilizers and pesticides must be cautious.
Ernst is naturally not a fan of the "green agriculture" in Africa in his previous life. Fertilizers and pesticides should still be used to increase production. Not only that, East Africa should also vigorously develop "agricultural genetic engineering."
However, the use of 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 pose a threat to humans. After all, countries did not have strict management of this in the 19th century.
All of this naturally requires East African researchers to conduct experiments first, determine the side effects, and then selectively promote it on a large scale.
The less pollution there is, the better. Although East Africa will have to do more work than other countries, it will have little impact on the overall economy of East Africa.
The pollution is your own, just like your health is your own. Even if the capitalists just run away, governments around the world will still have to work hard to address environmental problems. No one can escape this difficulty.
East Africa should pay more attention to this point. East Africa is one of the countries with the largest non-ferrous metal reserves in the world, and mineral resources are concentrated in inland areas, so environmental issues cannot be taken lightly.
Pollution in coastal areas will drift to other seas along the ocean currents. Even because of issues of maritime sovereignty, other countries will pollute even if you do not.
It is obvious that the country that will cause the most serious pollution to the Indian Ocean in the future will be India, so Ernst has no psychological burden at all when dumping garbage into the sea.
With the end of the meeting, the East African government began a new round of work, especially the re-planning and management of mines and ore refineries.
The key is the storage management of slag and the key protection of the river environment in the mining area. This is actually very easy. After solving the slag storage problem, the pollution of the river will basically be reduced, unless there is some liquid pollution source, there is no way to solve it.
Cities with slightly better conditions can only carry out simple sedimentation and filtration of polluted water before discharging it into rivers, lakes and seas, but this also greatly reduces the pressure on inland rivers in East Africa.
This series of work has indeed brought some troubles to East Africa's industrial and agricultural production, but it is not a big problem. After all, the main economic entity in East Africa is publicly owned. Private enterprises may have complaints, after all, they need to arrange more manpower and increase production processes. For East African enterprises, they naturally do what the government says, and there is no problem with execution.
(End of this chapter)
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