African Entrepreneurship Record

Chapter 1268: Chapter 277: Forestry Resources

”And integrating local tin mine resources also includes building smelting plants, tinplate production plants, and power plants among other facilities.”

To save costs, East Africa will focus on integrating and optimizing tin mine resources in the Kra Isthmus, ultimately providing refined materials and semi-finished products to East African local industries, reducing middlemen and transportation costs.

Fen Ge’er continued: ”In terms of cultivating local cash crops, we will focus on developing the local rubber plantation industry, thereby replacing part of our domestic rubber planting area.”

”In other aspects, the development of other tropical forestry resources will be prioritized, such as fruits, timber, and other suitable economic crops for tropical rainforest areas.”

It can be seen that East Africa’s development plan for the Kra Isthmus has typical colonial characteristics, whether it is from mineral resource development or plantation economy construction. The sole purpose is to turn the local area into a raw material supply place for East Africa.

Regarding colonial markets, this is also one of East Africa’s scarcest elements; the sizes of East African colonial markets are not large, as the characteristic of many East African colonies is a low population, naturally leading to low demand.

As for the Kra Strait Territory, East Africa also needs to clear out more than half of the population that can’t be ”integrated.” Once East Africa completes its surgical ”separation” of the local area, the market size will be even smaller. However, for every gain, there is a loss, and the East African government isn’t missing the small Kra Isthmus market. After immigrants arrive, it won’t take many years for the area to recover.

Fen Ge’er said: ”Besides, we plan to build an oil pipeline and two oil refining plants in the local area, not only considering economic aspects but also energy and defense strategy factors.”

The Kra Isthmus can be considered to be in a very subtle position, with the west close to the Beibu Gulf territory and the east not far from East Kalimantan, both crucial oil-producing regions of East Africa.

Thus, building oil refining plants locally has more significance in preventing disruption via the Malacca Strait, as the oil resources from both areas can still flow smoothly.

It is noteworthy that currently, oil in the Persian Gulf is yet to be developed, so East Africa’s oil facilities will focus on Songkla.

Apart from facilitating the transportation of East Kalimantan oil back to East Africa, it also ensures fuel supply to the Pacific Fleet in wartime scenarios.

Of course, this scenario assumes that the East Kalimantan oil production region is occupied by another country, causing East Africa to lose oil sources in the Pacific Region and forcing it to supply the Pacific Fleet from the Indian Ocean direction.

However, the likelihood of this happening is very small, and the Kra Strait Territory’s oil industry layout essentially considers East Africa’s future oil energy needs, especially the export work of Persian Gulf oil to the Far East region.

Here, the Far East region is not limited to the Far East Empire, as most countries around the world are lacking in oil resources.

With control over Beibu Gulf and numerous oil-producing colony areas, East Africa is actually no longer short on oil resources, and exporting oil inevitably becomes one of East Africa’s crucial economic development methods.

In fact, East Africa is currently the world’s largest exporter of refined oil and importer of crude oil. A typical example is East Africa importing oil from Russia, Venezuela, and other places, processing it into gasoline or diesel, kerosene, among other refined oils, and exporting them to other regions of the world. Today, the two major alliances in Europe are big buyers of East African refined oil.

After discussing the oil industry, Fen Ge’er continued: ”We’ll extensively develop the forestry resources in the Kra Strait Territory to reduce the scale of wood production in our eastern regions, actively utilizing the Kra Strait Territory’s climate, transforming it into an important tree farm to meet the lumber deficit in areas with relatively fragile climate and ecology in our country.”

Apart from tin mines, the most valuable resource currently in the Kra Strait Territory is its abundant forest resources, and East Africa still has a significant lumber deficit.

Despite possessing the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest—the Congo rainforest—and East Africa’s forest coverage exceeding fifty percent, theoretically, East Africa shouldn’t lack timber.

However, forest resource distribution in East Africa is uneven, concentrated in the central and western regions of East Africa. In the east, except for former Mozambique and Tanzania regions, most areas are relatively arid.

Thus, importing timber from the Nanyang region is more cost-effective to protect local grasslands or forest resources.

Especially for the Kra Strait Territory, it is very close to the East Coast of East Africa, and its climate is suitable for timber production, plus it covers a considerable area.

Fifty thousand square kilometers of land may seem insignificant against the vastness of East Africa, but in many other countries, this is a substantial size.

And on this fifty thousand square kilometers of land, the majority is suitable for developing forestry resources, and even if half of it is turned into tree farms, that’s not a small amount.

Local forestry resources will mainly supply East Africa’s Somali and Kenya regions, Somali being noteworthy, especially adjacent to the Turkana Province, a major forestry-producing region.

However, land transportation between Turkana and Somali is inconvenient, and Turkana’s forestry output predominantly comes from mountain areas in southern Ethiopia, where timber processing and transportation are cumbersome.

Though the Kra Strait Territory also features some mountains and hills, these mountains generally have lower altitudes, and the Kra Strait Territory boasts a significant plain area.

Combining the cost advantage of maritime transport effectively provides East African East Coast regions with inexpensive timber supply.

Whilst timber export might be regarded as a very low-end industry, this doesn’t mean it lacks importance; on the contrary, it is very crucial.

Such as construction, furniture, mold-making, industrial production, etc., are heavy consumers of timber, and before large-scale coal utilization, timber was the world’s most important fuel; not mentioning furniture alone demands a shocking amount of timber.

After all, tables, chairs, benches, etc., are basic household necessities, and these are consumable items; though people of this era are relatively simple and understand saving, it doesn’t change the inevitability that furniture products deteriorate over time.

With over a hundred million people in East Africa, the annual timber demand is quite astonishing; even simple products like chopsticks result in significant forest felling each year, although East Africa’s bamboo products are increasing, the scale of bamboo planting in Africa is inherently small, so replacing timber is still premature.

At this point, Ernst also said: ”While East Africa isn’t short of forest resources, we should also note that the rapid development over the past few decades in East Africa has already caused adverse impacts on some ecologically fragile areas.”

”Especially in the Eastern Province, Bohemia Province, Lorraine Province, and several regions in our east, they lie in the transitional zones between grassland and desert.”

”In the past, destructive development in these areas has caused soil erosion, desertification, and other significant problems.”

”According to monitoring data, in the past decade, both the Kalahari Desert and Somali Desert have exhibited expansion trends, posing threats to some of our habitable regions.”

”Chief among the factors are excessive tree felling and grazing, so for the Empire’s ecological and environmental concerns, we must plan ahead, such as setting ecological boundaries, especially limiting development in ecologically fragile areas.”

”Moreover, importing timber and minerals from colonies can protect our native ecological safety to a certain degree.”

Of course, Ernst just mentioned it; presently, East Africa’s mainstream focus remains development-first, and as for environmental protection, when East Africa’s environmental problems become significant, changing policies won’t be too late.

In reality, East Africa’s contradiction between ecological and industrial development is still within controllable limits; after all, East Africa has a history of only several decades, though its population has grown to over a hundred million, this isn’t a small population scale. But for a long time before reaching a hundred million, East Africa’s population remained in the tens of millions.

This population count is inclusive of the natives, after all, before East Africa colonized Africa, there were already millions of Black people living here, and the current East African citizenry has gradually accrued to over a hundred million.