Dec. 23 -As the Ethiopia-China Economic, Trade and Cultural Cooperation Forum is currently underway in Hangzhou, China, the Ethiopian government envisaged the forum to provide a new impetus to the comprehensive partnership between the two countries. The forum kicked off on Dec. 20. According to the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the forum is one major result of the longstanding relations that the two countries have enjoyed for many years. “Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the two countries have steadily strengthened a relationship based on their common interests. The two countries have also been and are working closely together in regional and international matters,” the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Dec. 21.
Foreign Minister Aklilu Hailemichael praised the government and people of China for playing a prominent role in his country’s economic boom. “The Ethiopia-China Economic, Trade and Cultural Cooperation Forum will further enhance the multifaceted ties between the two countries,” the statement quoted Hailemichael as saying.
Hailemichael has also briefed participants of the forum regarding Ethiopia’s untapped human and natural resources, together with Addis Ababa’s commitment to promoting investment schemes in the East African country.
China, Ethiopia’s largest trading partner, is a major player in Ethiopia’s investment, trade and diplomatic landscape. In just the past two decades, Chinese companies have invested close to $4 billion in Ethiopia. According to the Ethiopian Investment Commission, the bilateral trade volume also reached $6.37 billion in 2015.
The recently published McKinsey report also indicated that Ethiopia, together with South Africa, has developed a robust partnership” with China, along with a high degree of economic engagement in the form of investment, trade, loans, and aid.
Dec. 23 -Some 86 countries and international organizations have signed 100 cooperation agreements with China under the Belt and Road Initiative. He Lifeng, head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said the initiative made major headway in 2017, citing progress in key areas including capacity, investment and the Digital Silk Road.
Steady progress was made in the building of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Mombasa-Nairobi railway has been put into operation, construction has begun on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Hungary-Serbia railway and the Khalifa Port in the United Arab Emirates, the operation of the Hambantota Port has also been transferred to a Chinese firm, said He. So far, cargo train have made more than 7,000 trips between China and Europe, according to He.
(June 3, 2020) Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche commented on the situation in the USA, saying that the overall situation, with COVID 19, the famine pandemic, and the strategic tensions, on top of the instability in the streets, the solution requires the unique and different approach of the Schiller Institute. With 50 million people unemployed and underemployed, what is needed is the New Paradigm for civilization.
Reason, and a change in the thinking of citizens, organizations and government institutions is urgent to understand the British empire’s manipulation, and to defeat it. Their destabilization plan is not simply more Hong Kong style riots, but Malthusian genocide policy, and the elimination of sovereign cooperation among the United States, Russia, and China, in particular.
As in the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, the ulterior motives of the City of London and Wall Street financial elites, who are actually running these operations, are mostly unknown to those who wish to stand up against injustice. The plans were spelled out in a banker’s meeting in September 2019 in Jackson Hole, and are now being played out in the USA. The oligarchy’s methods of creating chaos, and regime change, using “divide and conquer” strategy are nothing new.
“The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy; The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs” is designed to address the present national and global emergency. 50 million Americans must be given employment in truly productive jobs at wage levels commensurate with high living standards. This will also for the first time address the systemic unemployment, under-employment and mis-employment actually at the root of “the American urban crisis” for the past half-century and more. Training programs to qualify millions of persons from 17 to 30 years of age in machining, essential manufacturing skills, the medical field, construction, transportation and supplemental services, as well as in the frontier fields of space technology will prepare a new generation to shape the Earth’s next 50 years and more. Their creative reason applied to the labor process, developing new productive capability, is the true source of wealth.
Further, those 50 million jobs are the fulcrum to leverage the greatest physical economic transformation in human history, involving 1.5 billion jobs worldwide. Globalist geopolitics must be immediately superseded. A new cultural and economic paradigm must be envisioned, designed and enacted. That can begin with the United States, China, Russia and India convening a “Four Powers”summit, and discussing how to work together to bring this New Paradigm employment program into being over the next months.
Dec. 22, 2017 -The connection of the Austrian capital via a broad-gauge rail track with the Slovakian city Kosice, and the construction of large freight logistics facilities at Parndorf, near Vienna, will create up to 140,000 new permanent jobs, transport experts working for the implementation of the project are forecasting. The project is named as a priority in the national infrastructure development plan of the new Austrian government. Once completed, the Parndorf freight terminal will handle 54 container freight trains from China weekly. Now: Will the EU give its member Austria financial support, or will the Austrians have to rely on China–as do numerous countries in Eastern and Southeastern Europe, with their own infrastructure projects?
Dec. 22, 2017 -When the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS) opened online registrations for the first Paris Forum on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in November, there were so many requests that IRIS had to close registrations earlier than expected. “The Paris Forum is an opportunity to work very concretely on projects of common interest,” former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told Xinhua. The BRI has allowed different countries to sit down around a table to discuss cooperation, and multilateral dialogue is a good model for cooperation, especially for today’s world, explained another former Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, president of the Prospective and Innovation Foundation. Raffarin represented President Macron at the May Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing. The BRI is also one of the responses to multilateralism, which “can create closer Franco-Chinese collaboration,” said IRIS director Pascal Boniface.
The initiative obviously benefits more “Made in France” products and French companies, experts say. One example is the Lyon-Wuhan freight rail line, which was launched in April 2016. Since then, thousands of bottles of Bordeaux wine, other French agricultural products, and auto parts have been exported to China. In addition, communication between Chinese and French communities is becoming increasingly open and transparent, they said.
May 29—With all the chatter in the U.S. about “reopening the economy”, it seems no one asked, “What economy?” Perhaps with the confluence of crises — an escalating danger of war with China, the Coronavirus pandemic, and the threat of famine, to name a few — no one noticed that the post-industrial neoliberal economy is undergoing an accelerating systemic collapse.
Well, the collaborators of the late economist Lyndon LaRouche not only recognized the collapse underway, but are mobilizing for a plan to reverse it. In today’s webcast, Helga Zepp LaRouche counter-posed the optimism behind the new LaRouchePAC Report, “The LaRouche Plan to Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New Productive Jobs” to the understandable anxiety over the continuing lockdown. With the U.S. set to go back into space, with the scheduled launch of a rocket to take a crew to the International Space Station, it is time to recapture the optimism which has been under attack, by those controlling the presently doomed paradigm.
In a review of the crises, Mrs. LaRouche asks her audience to join her in building the New Paradigm, as envisioned by her late husband, starting with his program for a 4 Power agreement between the U.S., Russia, India and China, for a New Bretton Woods. There is a unique solution to the cries, she emphasized, based on the understanding of what her husband championed, the concept of “physical economy.”
Dec. 26 – In the first-ever trilateral meeting, foreign ministers of China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan reaffirmed their commitment to improving their relations, deepening mutually beneficial cooperation, advancing connectivity under China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, and fighting terrorism in all its forms and manifestation without any distinction, PTI Islamabad reported today. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted the first China-Afghanistan-Pakistan Foreign Ministers’
Dialogue in Beijing with Afghanistan and Pakistan Foreign Ministers, respectively Salahuddin Rabbani and Khawaja Muhammad Asif.
In his proposal to extend their $57 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) to Afghanistan, Wang, talking to the reporters, pointed to Afghanistan’s urgent need to develop and
improve people’s lives, and his hopes it can join inter-connectivity initiatives. “So China and Pakistan are willing to look at–with Afghanistan, on the basis of win-win– mutually beneficial principles, using an appropriate way,” he said, Afghanistan’s TOLONews reported.
In his bilateral meeting with the Afghan Foreign Minister Rabbani, Wang said China hoped to synergize its development strategy for Afghanistan and expand bilateral cooperation. China expected to see a wide and inclusive political reconciliation process in Afghanistan, led and owned by the Afghan people, he said, Afghanistan’s Pajhwok reported. Rabbani, welcoming the proposal and hailing China as a reliable partner, said his country was ready to actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, and enhance cooperation with China in areas of inter-connectivity, infrastructure and energy.
As we come to the end of a tumultuous year, the prospect of the consolidation of a New Paradigm of international cooperation is bright, one which can free the world from the dangers inherent in the strategic instability of imperial geopolitics. An unstoppable dynamic was introduced when China’s Xi Jinping inaugurated steps for creating a Silk Road process of land, sea and space collaboration — unstoppable, unless the forces of the old paradigm, centered in the City of London and Wall Street, succeed in their coup against the Trump presidency, in which case the world is on a short fuse to nuclear war and annihilation.
At the forefront of this dramatic shift has been the organization of the LaRouche movement, which, under the leadership of Lyndon and Helga Zepp LaRouche, has been providing a clear strategic direction away from the neocons preferred “unipolar” world order. Throughout the year, the Schiller Institute has held numerous international conferences, with Mrs. LaRouche speaking at events in China, throughout Europe and in the United States. In recent months, she has been presenting a weekly webcast, to provide clarity and vision, at a time when Fake News dominates media in the Trans-Atlantic world. The discrediting of the whole “Russiagate” narrative, has opened the door for more people to discover who is behind it, what is their intent, and what is the alternative to their destructive agenda.
Events in the next months will be crucial in deciding whether or not the United States will join with Russia and China in adopting the “win-win” vision of international cooperation at the heart of the Silk Road process. Join us this Thursday for an update on where the world is heading, and what you can do, to insure the success of a rapid transition to the New Paradigm.
May 27 —This week’s pending launch of the NASA/SpaceX manned Crew Dragon flight to the International Space Station (ISS) has put “Launch America” optimism back into the everyday atmosphere in the U.S.—not only the vision of space travel once again, but the joy of science and technology. Today’s last- minute postponement of the take-off was due only to weather, not malfunction or a mystery glitch. President Donald Trump and Mrs. Trump, on hand in Florida this afternoon, will return Saturday to the Kennedy Space Center for the rescheduled launch May 30 at 3:22 pm EDT; if weather again intervenes, May 31 is the next launch date.
The additional dimension to the U.S. renewed space commitment is international cooperation. NASA Director Jim Bridenstine, speaking at a pre-launch briefing May 27, was asked about the U.S. relationship to Russia, and he replied, “our cooperation transcends above terrestrial geopolitics.” This is the same spirit of cooperation that Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche calls for in her petition, “Coronavirus Petition: Build a Global Health Infrastructure.”
Bridenstine stressed the importance of the SpaceX Dragon Crew launch, scheduled to take place from the historic pad 39 at the Kennedy Space Center, will be the first time since July 2011 that America, “will launch American astronauts, on American rockets, from American soil.” He reflected that, as this launch is taking place in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, one thing that will inspire our America is that “all of America can take a moment and look at our country do something stunning again.” Astronaut Nicole Mann emphasized that the flight is our first big step on our road map to the Moon for the Artemis mission and on to Mars. Bridenstine stressed great confidence in the mission, despite the fact that some of the media questions expressed certain doubts or fears of the agencies’ absolute preparedness.
Bridenstine reiterated that the safety of the astronauts was the number one priority of NASA. (In fact, at 4:18 p.m. today, Jim Bridenstine tweeted: “Cloud with lightning No launch for today – safety for our crew members Astro_Doug and @AstroBehnken is our top priority. We’ll try, try again to #LaunchAmerica on Saturday with liftoff at 3:22pm ET. NASA TV will begin coverage at 11 am. Join us again virtually: https://go.nasa.gov/2yqlIIQ.” He did make the point again that NASA is a customer of SpaceX and the commercial crew flights and that the hopes are that these flights would soon be taking place without NASA, to lower the cost and build up the presence of commercial space activities in low-Earth orbit.
He talked about the need to launch a future commercial space station and some of the technologies that would be expanded there, such as 3D printing of organs in space.
In response to a question on U.S.-Russia cooperation and negotiations on the commercial launches, Bridenstine reiterated regarding the ISS, to which the crew will be launching, that half of the station is Russian and the other half American. He said, if we are going to have the continued cooperation that we have had, the U.S. has to be willing to launch cosmonauts on the commercial crew, and Russia has to be willing to launch NASA astronauts on the Soyuz. He pointed to the U.S.-Russian partnership going back to 1975 with Apollo/Soyuz, followed by Shuttle/MIR and then the ISS. Most importantly, “our cooperation transcends above terrestrial geopolitics,” said Bridenstine.
He concluded by responding to a question about the efforts and credit that go to previous administrations for what is underway in the space program today. He said the space program stretches beyond one administration to another, and said space exploration unites people beyond geopolitical boundaries, unites not only Democrats and Republicans, but all nations. President Donald Trump has made a commitment to return American astronauts to the Moon for permanent presence with the Artemis mission and on to Mars. He reiterated the bipartisan support for Artemis.
The world death rate from famine this year could reach 300,000 people a day, unless we mount a food mobilization to stop it. This threat far exceeds the 315,000 death toll so far from COVID-19. We face a hunger pandemic “of biblical proportions,” David Beasley, Director General of the UN World Food Program (WFP) warned the UN Security Council April 21.
At the same time, farmers in the U.S. are mass destroying their meat animals, milk and other food. By September, 10 million hogs may have been put down. Millions of eggs and chickens have been destroyed, and millions of gallons of milk dumped. It is known why farmers are forced to do this, and yet it continues. Farmers themselves are facing ruin. This must stop.
We have to have a crash program to save farmers and agriculture capacity, and to deliver the food to all who need it. With this emergency mobilization, we can launch the replacement of the globalist cartel system which caused the vulnerability to disease and scarcity in the first place. It is a policy failure. There is nothing “natural” about this disaster.
In Africa and South Asia, the desert locust plague is ravaging cropland in a second wave of devastation, when it was known ahead of time, and could have been stopped.
It is a crime against humanity to allow this destruction to continue. Farmers want to produce food. Millions of lives are at stake.
Save Farmers, Stop Food Destruction!
In the United States, butchering capacity, monopolized by a cartel of five multinational commodities firms, has been consolidated into fewer than 300 mega-processing facilities accounting for 80% of the meat, while another other 2,000 facilities provide only 20%, in contrast to 30 years ago, when over 9,000 facilities of all sizes were in operation. Workers at today’s mega-plants are underpaid, work in slave labor-like conditions, and are commonly undocumented and fearful.
The situation is the same in Germany, in Spain, Brazil, and many other producing regions. In Germany in May, large meat-processing facilities were shut in Schleswig Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia, with hundreds of workers down sick, and others quarantined in their squalid barracks. They are low-paid labor from Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland. Their situation is the norm everywhere for the global meat cartel.
When COVID-19 swept through the giant U.S. packing plants, thousands of workers were stricken; dozens have died. Plants shut. A Federal order was issued April 27 for them to re-open—under safe protocols—but no Federal intervention was made. No adequate corporate measures have taken place. Dozens of the slaughtering houses remain closed, or are only partially open. The backlog of “stranded” animals—ready for market—numbers in the millions. Farmers have no means to warehouse livestock, and they have received no income support for their losses. Farm country suicides are the highest in the nation. The U.S. stands to lose a quarter or more of its farm and ranch producers in the coming months.
There are severe disruptions to milk and other perishables, the processing and retailing of which are also cartel controlled, and concentrated in the same vulnerable way.
Deploy emergency measures now. In the U.S., this means Federal financial aid immediately to the farmers, and Federal intervention by forces of the Army Corps of Engineers, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and other agencies, to sanitize and reconfigure all food-processing facilities for safety and maximum throughput. Create proper working conditions and wage levels; organize additional work teams. Locate contingency processing capacity; provide credit and aid for expansion. Locate extra freezer and locker capacity at closed institutions such as schools for expanded storage.
The principle involved is to save all possible food from destruction, and to defend farmers and ranchers everywhere in the world. Get the food to everywhere it is needed. Milk capacity is in crisis. Expand every way to process milk for longer storage and distribution, including cheese, powder, ultrahigh-temperature pasteurized products, as well as to maximize fresh fluid milk. Pay the farmers properly; preserve the herds. There is no “glut” of milk, nor pork, nor grain, nor any other food, as the “markets” talk of supply-and-demand would have you believe.
Deliver Food Aid, Double Agricultural Capacity
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world already had 821 million people who chronically have no reliable daily food, which is now labeled as “food insecurity.” The World Food Program had been providing food aid directly to 100 million people in acute need of food, who would have perished without it. But now, the WFP foresees this number of people in acute need of food, shooting up to 265 million people this year, and possibly many more. Their locations include: 194 million people in 37 nations in Africa; 62 million people in 10 nations in Asia; 33 million people in 6 nations in South America and the Caribbean.
Start a production mobilization. The tonnage of food aid for this number of people, considered just in terms of cereals grains, is 50 million metric tons this year. This is fully 20% of all the grains traded annually on the world market in recent years. The land area required to yield this much grain is the size of Belgium. More food must be produced. The WFP has put out a donations appeal for $12 billion for food aid this year, way above last year’s $8 billion appeal. But even if pledges miraculously come through, will the food be there?
Deploy for the goal to double world food production as soon as possible. Instead of the current annual grains harvest of 2.5-2.7 billion metric tons (bmt), a world harvest of 5 bmt will provide a quality diet for all, support population growth, and enable food reserves for security.
The Schiller Institute had called for this 12 years ago, and had it been achieved by now, there would be no threat of a hunger pandemic today. On May 3, 2008, Schiller Institute founding President Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued a call, that
“it will be fatal for the world as a whole, if we do not succeed immediately, in the coming days and weeks, to declare globalization a failure, and to set everything into motion to double agricultural production capacity in the shortest possible time!”
But the cartel monopoly system has only tightened its control since the 2007-08 financial crisis. The cartel’s lying narrative is that producing abundance means low prices and bankruptcy for farmers, and that cartel global food sourcing serves populations better than national food self-sufficiency. Today’s crisis exposes those lies.
Use every means now to support production of the needed volumes of food for the pandemic and hunger emergency, especially by making calculated use of the Southern Hemisphere harvest, and Northern Spring planting seasons now underway, and their alternating crop cycles ahead.
Stop Africa’s Locust Plague
Deploy all resources to stop the second wave of desert locusts that now extends from East Africa across to India. The crop losses are terrible. In one day, a small swarm can consume the food in a square kilometer of crops—the food 35,000 people would eat in day. At harvest time in June and July is just when the hopper stage of the second swarms of the locust will mature to young adults, capable of vast destruction; 42 million people in ten nations are in the affected zone from Yemen south to Tanzania. The Food and Agriculture Organization has succeeded in helping save 720,000 tons of food in the region, pre-positioned for 5 million people for a year.
Expedite the provision of needed aircraft, chemicals and personnel for aerial spraying, the mainstay for killing the insects. The FAO has appealed for $150 million, but pledges remain under that amount. If not stopped, the locusts will spread westward into the Sahel this summer. Between commercial crop sprayers, drones and military expertise, this scourge can be ended. Allowing it to proceed is genocide.
Declare debt moratoria and cancellation for the whole continent of Africa. No scarce national resources can go to debt payments at this time of need for anti-pandemic and anti-hunger operations.
The next step is credit for launching the development projects to realize the vast agriculture potential of the continent. Africa has half the world’s arable land still remaining to be brought into cultivation and pasture. It will be the farm belt of the whole world.
But the African agro-industrial economy has been deliberately kept down by the City of London/Wall Street monetarist system. The continent went from being 25% dependent on outside imports of staple grains, 30 years ago, to now 40% dependent. The cartels dominate that trade, while profiteering off cheaply produced African food sent to Europe—fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish. The same cartel trade pattern in the Americas ships food to the United States from economies kept poor, and desperately needing food aid, such as Guatemala and Haiti. As of 2019, the first beef from Africa went to Europe, and this year, into the United States. Namibia, 60% import dependent for its basic consumption, is now exporting beef, which capacity belongs for Africa.
Start the great projects. The Transaqua project, a continental priority, will resupply water to the Lake Chad Basin, benefiting the entire Sub-Saharan region, by diverting flow from the Congo River Basin, which will benefit from new transportation, power, agriculture and water management systems. Nuclear power and desalination on the Mediterranean and other littorals will create vast new water supplies. These programs will end the grounds for national conflict over how to use scarce resources.
Sovereign Government Action
Food is a human right. If governments assert sovereignty over food and farming, we will defeat the hunger catastrophe, and open a new era of food sufficiency for all.
Three areas of action: Anti-Trust: First, break up the food and agro-monopolies (chemicals, fertilizer, seeds) and cartels. Invoke national security in the short term, to override cartel practices blocking emergency food measures. Then use full-scale anti-trust laws and executive orders. Every nation has this authority, and most have precedent. Some governments may nationalize food enterprises. Restore nation-serving policies of food reserves, and regionally dispersed food processing, advanced food preservation—including irradiation—and diversified farming. Abandon the World Trade Organization, whose premises are designed to oppose national sovereignty over food.
The world grain trade has come to be dominated by ABCD, the cartel accounting for 90% of all grain traded: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus. In the course of their consolidation of control, sovereign national grain boards were eliminated; nationally controlled food reserves eliminated; single-crop monoculture became widespread. A world meat cartel of mega-multinationals also dominates in most nations. In the U.S. the five main firms controlling meat processing and marketing are JBS (Brazil-headquartered); Cargill (U.S.A.); Tyson Foods (U.S.A.); National Beef (Marring, based in Brazil); Smithfield (WH Holdings, China). Their standard operating procedures created a disaster.
Take measures to end all other kinds of financialization of food and farming. Stop food commodity speculation on the world’s major exchanges. Stop lenders and trading cartels demanding that poverty-stricken nations export food to earn foreign exchange.
Support family farmers: Secondly, supply emergency income support to farmers. No foreclosures. Declare debt moratoria, and reorganization during this emergency. Indemnify farmers and ranchers for livestock and related losses. Establish a parity-based farm commodity pricing system. Utilize laws already on the books, but ignored under the cartel dominance: in Europe, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP); in the U.S., the Commodity Credit Corp. (the CCC from the 1930s), and other models and initiatives.
End the anti-farming “green” rules and harassment, done wrongfully in the name of protecting the environment from climate change. Launch the overdue infrastructure projects on every continent, to provide vast new amounts of water, power and transport, essential to productive agriculture.
Create the required credit through either scaling up one or more of the existing development-oriented multilateral banks with multi-nation membership—e.g., the New Development Bank, or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), or create a new vehicle in FDR’s tradition of agencies mandated by the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Today’s epochal crisis makes such a strategy realistic.
A million new farmers on every continent. Organize special means to widely expand the family farm system, especially young farmers and ranchers starting out, through direct grants, tax benefits, ample credit and land availability. Use the spirit of President Abraham Lincoln’s initiatives, e.g. the three-page Homestead Act, which settled farm families throughout the vast Midwest. The ingenuity and mission of family farm members, with the living standard, education and science to go along, are the best guarantees of food security for every nation and worldwide.
Spread the model of the “astronaut farmer,” equipped with global positioning, data keeping, mechanization, and scientific practices. Farmers-as-ambassadors are ready and willing to go and spread space-age agriculture and space-age brotherhood.
International collaboration: Launch the international collaboration to make all this work, to provide the needed food relief in the coming weeks and save millions of lives; and to start the shift to a new paradigm of economic functioning and great power relations. China is already active in Africa with water, power and rail projects in the Belt and Road Initiative, aligned with the African Union’s Agenda-2063 program. Russia is active with Egypt’s nuclear power and desalination plans, and other projects. Add what the United States can do, being the largest food donor in the world, and a new era of strategic cooperation opens.
We call on the leaders of the great powers to initiate collaboration against the hunger pandemic. Include this on the agenda of their earliest possible summit: Presidents Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and others who are willing.
“Give Us This Day, Our Daily Bread” is a universal plea. Let us answer this prayer.
