Chapter 908: Sustainable Development

Resource-intensive industries, also known as land-intensive industries, obviously involve industries that rely on land and related resources, and the most typical of these are agriculture and mining.

East Africa is a typical agricultural and mining powerhouse. Agriculture needs no further explanation. Mining 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 also begun to rise year by year. Agriculture is still easy to say, because of the backwardness of East Africa's chemical industry, agriculture is still dominated by organic agriculture, and the development of mineral resources has caused serious pollution to land and rivers.

Take Kabwe City as an example. Don't underestimate Kabwe as just an unknown city. In fact, in the past, Kabwe was one of the ten most polluted cities in the world.

Kabwe's dominant minerals are lead and zinc, which will cause serious heavy metal pollution during mining, and it is almost irreversible. However, human demand for lead and zinc is indispensable, so lead and zinc production areas like Kabwe cannot be directly stagnant in East Africa. Instead, production must be increased to meet the needs of industries such as electricity, military industry, metallurgy, and chemicals.

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

"Mineral resource development will generate a lot of pollution, which are solid, liquid and gas in order."

"Gas pollution prevention and control is indeed difficult to solve, but solid and liquid pollution problems must be solved at the same time. After all, mining industry resource development produces a lot of slag and harmful substances, which are the most serious pollution to land and rivers."

"This is even worse than agriculture. Although agriculture has a great impact on the ecology, agriculture itself is part of the ecosystem and has a substitute effect, while the impact of mining on the ecology is almost negative. If we don't pay attention to this problem, then in fifty or sixty years, many cities will decline directly due to resource depletion or ecological problems."

"Of course, it doesn't sound very serious. After all, cities can be redeveloped. There is decline and rise, but the pollution of land and rivers is also a problem. It will be completely different. These cities and surrounding areas will become scars that are difficult to heal on the land of East Africa in the future. "

"Although East Africa has rich 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 cannot survive due to pollution, then Egypt is basically a country in name only."

"Of course, we in East Africa cannot be compared with Egypt after all. The land that can be developed and utilized in Egypt cannot even be compared with the northern province of East Africa, but by the same token, our industrial scale is not comparable to that of Egypt."

In the final analysis, environmental governance is similar to the sanitation of a room. Every day, the owner of the room will produce various household garbage. The diligent people will clean up the garbage they produce every day and throw it into the trash can downstairs, while the sloppy people will keep accumulating it until they can no longer fit it before they start to clean it.

Ernst couldn't say the pros and cons of the two models. After all, the room ended up being clean, but the diligent people lived in a clean house every day, while the sloppy people "endured it for a while" before cleaning it.

The main point of this conference is actually the management of waste slag and waste rock. The means are not difficult. In summary, it is centralized storage.

The first thing to consider is to stay away from rivers and cultivated land, and then to place it in residential areas, in areas that are difficult to use and will not cause serious impact on the ecology.

Moreover, slag may not have no secondary utilization value. In the 19th century, mineral smelting technology was quite backward. Perhaps there were unrefined resources in the waste slag, and they may be reused after future technological advances.

After talking about the mining industry, the topic returned to agriculture, a resource-intensive industry. In the final analysis, agriculture has the largest impact and coverage area. After all, not every place has economically valuable mineral resources, but agriculture is everywhere. Even in the desert, some special small-scale agriculture can be developed.

For agriculture, it is a commonplace problem, including water system management, cultivated 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 the national assets that are damaged. Therefore, agricultural development must naturally meet the needs of the international market, which is inseparable from mechanization, crop selection, fertilizer and pesticide production.

The general direction of mechanization has long been determined, and the selection of crops naturally prioritizes the transition to cash crop planting, with the focus on the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

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

Ernst is naturally not a tout 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 must also vigorously develop "agricultural genetic engineering."

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

Some pesticides are not just pesticides, they may also threaten people, after all, in the 19th century, countries did not strictly manage this.

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.

Less pollution is better. In this way, although East Africa will do more than other countries, it will not have much impact on the overall economy of East Africa.

Pollution is your own, just like health is your own. The capitalists patted their butts and ran away. In the future, governments of various countries still have to work hard to rectify environmental problems. No one can escape this difficulty.

And 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 still concentrated in inland areas, so environmental issues cannot be sloppy.

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

Obviously, the country with the most serious pollution in the Indian Ocean in the future is India, so Ernst dumped garbage into the sea without any psychological burden.

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 storage of slag, the pollution of rivers will basically be reduced, unless there are some liquid pollution sources, there is no way.

Cities with slightly better conditions can only simply precipitate and filter polluted water bodies and then discharge them into rivers, lakes and seas, but this also greatly reduces the pressure on inland rivers in East Africa.

This series of work does bring some troubles to industrial and agricultural production in East Africa, but the problem is not big. After all, the main body of the economy in East Africa is publicly owned. If it is a private enterprise, there may be complaints. After all, more people need to be arranged and production processes need to be increased. For East African enterprises, it is natural to do what the government says, and there is no problem in execution.