Dec. 16 – During his four-day visit to China, which concludes today in the city of Chongqing, South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that he and President Xi Jinping have agreed “to actively look for ways of actual cooperation between China’s One Belt, One Road Initiative (BRI)” and South Korea’s own foreign policy initiative–the “New North” and “New South” policies–which seek greater economic and diplomatic cooperation with Eurasian as well as with Southeast Asian nations. Especially in light of Japan’s shift over the past several months toward the Belt and Road, Moon’s announcement is of great strategic significance, reflecting a move away from Western policies of geopolitical confrontation which today threaten to blow up the North Korean situation. As Moon stated explicitly, the Belt and Road holds the potential to bring peace and prosperity to the region.
In their broader discussions, the two leaders committed themselves to strengthening their bilateral relationship, and agreed to abide by the principles of mutual respect and regard for each other’s core interests. This is the basis for true “win-win” collaboration, Xi Jinping said, adding that he wants to promote the alignment of the BRI with Seoul’s development strategy.
That Moon made his announcement on the BRI in Chongqing is also important as this bustling city is a communications hub in western China that is “a pivotal location for China’s Belt and Road Initiative,” {Global Times} reported Dec. 15. Speaking at a business forum there, Moon elaborated further, according to a transcript of his speech cited by Yonhap News Agency. “I am confident a link between the One Belt, One Road Initiative and New North, New South policies will lead to peace and joint prosperity in the region and become a strong wave that spearheads the development of all of humanity,” he said.
For example, he detailed, “If the connection between an inter-Korean railroad and the Trans-Siberian Railway that South Korea is actively pursuing, meets China’s trans-China, Mongolia
and Russia economic corridor, [then] the rail, air and sea routes of Eurasia will reach all corners of the region,” Moon said.
Moon also called for efforts to build what he called a “digital Silk Road” between the two countries to assist the development of their IT industries and the fourth industrial revolution. Overseas markets are another key area of cooperation, he said. “I will actively support the joint advance of South Korean and Chinese firms into third countries,” he stated, and emphasized the importance of cooperation among countries in the region. (Japan’s Prime Minister Abe last week offered joint Japan-China funding of development projects in third countries.) Seoul and Beijing have already agreed to launch negotiations for an expansion of their free trade agreement (FTA), he reported, to include the service and financial sectors. The trade agreement went into effect in late 2015, but currently deals with products only. Lastly, Moon said, South Korea will work to strengthen its cooperation with China’s key regional governments, including Chongqing. “I believe economic cooperation between South Korea and Chongqing will greatly contribute to China’s development of [its] west, as well as balanced development of China, and I promise the South Korean government will do its utmost to boost their cooperation,” he told Chongqing’s Mayor Chen Miner.
Dec. 17 -China has opened a $1.7 billion credit line for Iran for the electrification of the 926 km railway running from Tehran to Mashhad in the east of the country. The terms are excellent: Two-thirds of the cost will be financed by the Chinese government at a very low interest rate, and the remaining third will be covered by Chinese insurer Sinosure (China Export and Credit Insurance Corp.), according to Iran’s Deputy Minister of Roads and Urban Development.
Five months ago, Iran signed an agreement with China National Machinery Import and Export Corp. (CMC) to carry out the electrification and upgrading, which is projected to take up to four years. The route is already double-tracked, but with electrificaiton, the speed will increase from 160 kph to 200 kph. Iran’s English-language Financial Tribune in reporting the credit agreement today, adding that CEO of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways Saeed Mohammadzadeh reports that when finished, the railroad–which forms part of the New Silk Road–will have the capacity to transport 25 million passengers and 10 million tons of cargo per year.
Iran’s goal is to electrify all of its rail by 2025.
Dec. 18, 2017 -The {Rail Freight} journal reports that Poland is hosting the first Rail Freight Summit next year, in the city of Wroclaw. Recent developments, {Rail Freight} writes, have pushed the New Silk Road — also known as One Belt, One Road — to the forefront of the Europe-Asia logistics corridors, what they mean for Poland and the other countries along the growing number of routes, not least China. As part of this development, Poland has become an increasingly vital hub for rail freight services, often as an interchange for container train services coming via Russia and Belarus, run by dozens of operators. The summit will review developments so far and look to the future to see the benefits that can be realized for all stakeholders, including rail operators, logistics firms, and all those involved in the supply chain.
The summit is taking place from March 20-21, and day one will start with a technical visit, enabling visitors to meet some of the people behind the logistical chains in Poland. The second part of the day will features keynote speeches on the meaning of the Silk Road & Poland, and the implications of the One Belt, One Road project for Eastern Europe. Day two begins with a focus on the ambitions of China, followed by sessions on how to connect the Silk Road routes and stops, and the business case for Poland and beyond. The summit is being jointly hosted by {Rail Freight} and Nieuwsblad Transport, and sponsored by Nunner Logistics.
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.
That sums up the report on a dialogue workshop held by the Wathiqat Wattan Foundation in Damascus called “Heading East … China,” given by SANA news agency on Dec. 16. The dialogue was opened by Presidential Political and Media Advisor Bouthaina Shaaban, who is also the Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of Wathiqat Wattan Foundation, and addressed by the Chinese Ambassador to Syria, with participants reported to be from both Syria and Lebanon.
Dr. Shaaban situated the discussion at the highest level. “There is a new world that is being formed not on the basis of hegemony and wars, but on the basis of scientific and technical cooperation between countries. Our role is carrying and disseminating Eastern culture and motivating societies in this direction,” she told participants. “The Arab region is witnessing a series of transitions, the most important of which is the rise of China as a global, economic, political, and cultural power, especially since China proposed several projects,” including the Belt and Road Initiative, she said, adding that workshops such as this are needed to discuss China’s role in the region and develop their own visions in order to benefit from China’s experience.
In June of 2016, Dr. Shaaban addressed the Schiller Institute’s international conference in Berlin, Germany via video hookup, and was scheduled to personally address its most recent conference in November, but was unable to attend because she had to travel to China at the last minute. According to SANA, China’s Ambassador to Syria Qi Qianjin agreed on the importance of such dialogue, and spoke of China’s interest in going towards the Middle East, where 60% of its oil and gas imports comes from, stating that China will not leave countries facing turmoil behind, including Syria. Other participants reportedly “recommended establishing universities and institutes to teach the Chinese language and promote student exchange programs to contribute to the Sino-Arab cultural intellectual rapprochement, as well as opening Chinese trade centers in Syria.”
Today {Asia Times} reported seperately that more than 30 Chinese firms have visited Syria this year, including China Energy Engineering Corporation and China Construction Fifth Engineering Division, and the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs has already approved a number of initial aid projects. During the First Trade Fair on Syrian Reconstruction Projects held in Beijing in early August, a Chinese-Arab business group announced a $2 billion commitment from the government for the construction of industrial parks in Syria.
The major point emphasized repeatedly by Helga Zepp LaRouche in today’s webcast is the importance of exposing the British role in the increasingly shrill anti-China operation, and contrasting that with the history of Lyndon LaRouche’s intervention on behalf of global cooperation for economic development. The pressure on President Trump to adopt a posture against the WHO is a dangerous escalation, run by the same people responsible for the attacks against him with Russiagate. Helga said she doubts that Trump wrote the letter to WHO President Tedros himself, but reflects instead the hysteria coming from Pompeo, Navarro, Esper and Tucker Carlson. The lies against China over the coronavirus are “geopolitical” in nature.
If the two largest economies can work together, for the benefit of mankind, there is no problem which cannot be solved. She used the example of the CGTN tv program on China’s fusion program, and the cooperation with ITER on it, as an example of how that could proceed. This is in the tradition of the development programs written by Lyndon LaRouche for every part of the world. It is in sharp contrast with the Green lunacy being pushed in Europe and the U.S., exemplified by the role being given to BlackRock for the bailout of speculators.
Dec. 8, 2017 -This week, China held the fourth World Internet Conference in Wizhen, with the implementation of the Digital Silk Road on the agenda. President Xi, in an opening statement last Sunday (Dec. 3), stressed “cyber sovereignty” that states should manage and contain their own Internet without interference. This will be important in being free to build the Silk Road projects, without attempts at outside interference or sabotage.
An important aspect of China’s push for the expansion of access to the Internet among the Silk Road countries, is to enable high technology development corridors, and to be able to build the large-scale infrastructure projects underway and planned. Much of the transportation infrastructure, for example, will traverse rural or uninhabited land, such as deserts. There must be a reliable communications and information network so phases of construction, delivery of materials, and availability of infrastructure will flow smoothly.
At the conference, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Thailand, Laos, Serbiia, and the UAE were amoing the countries that “agreed to cooperation with China in the digital economy to build an interconnected Digital Silk Road,” {NZ city} reports.
The Space Silk Road serves a compatible function, providing a view from Earth orbit that creates new tools with which to supervise, plan, map, and evaulate great projects. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is discussed as a concrete example of the application of digital technology, in Pakistan’s {Daily Times} on Dec.6.
The article details the CPEC projects, and the digital technologies that will make it a “high tech digital corridor.” Some progress is already being made, the article reports, in Africa. For eaxmple, the Exim Bank of China is providing technical expertise and is investing $1 billion for Internet connectivity in Cameroon, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Togo, and Niger.
Helga expanded on her discussion of why she is insisting that the present crisis is “The Big One”, and not a prelude to a bigger crisis to come. The problem, she said, is that people focus on aspects of the crisis, such as the pandemic, the financial crisis, global famine, the war danger, but miss the overall cause—that we are in a breakdown crisis fifty years in the making. There is no solution to the individual crises without addressing all crises at once.
This is possible today, because of the work done by Lyndon LaRouche, who identified that we are heading to an overall crash of the system, which is causing a chain reaction collapse into a Dark Age. By understanding this, we can begin to provide solutions, beginning with breaking from geopolitics and adopting a policy of agreement among the four great powers. Such an agreement for cooperation is the only way in which the individual crises can be addressed.
She spoke of the events held by the Schiller Institute over the last two weeks as representative of the kind of work we can do, to bring people to the level of thinking needed to succeed. In the end, she said that we must as a civilization go back to principle. She used the example of how the German Economic Miracle after World War II was based on a government applying the principle of physical economy as the basis for rebuilding. Such solutions are available today, so the viewers should join with the Schiller Institute to make such a miracle.
Dec. 11, 2017 -Speaking at the Sanya Forum on the Belt and Road, held on Hainan island, former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin called the Belt and Road “a showcase project building a new type of regional integration” and “a unique chance for local and global stability.” Globalization has created a complex network of interdependency, also in terms of risks, between countries, so that stronger regional integration is necessary in managing those risks, he said. The Belt and Road promotes political and cultural understanding by integrating countries from at least three continents, De Villepin said.
The expansion of infrastructure in remote regions will be a major driver of stability in Central Asia as well as East Africa, and economic stimulation will be a great opportunity to support long-term recovery in major economies like Europe and China, De Villepin told the forum. The Belt and Road “offers a new model of prosperity based on inclusiveness, sustainability and balance.”
We recommend the film “This is China: Epidsodes 1 and 2 of the Hongkong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge” which is a CGTN production.
The builders say that they plan to build another seven or eight such bridges, and show a map (42 minutes 45 seconds into the 50 minute film) with projects all over the world, including in the United States and Scandinavia.
This is China: Episode 1 of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge
This is China: Episode 2 of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge
