Chapter 1452 - 20: Pingyuan Province

Chapter 1452: Chapter 20: Pingyuan Province

However, it is obvious that East Africa cannot return to the era of slavery, which has caused many important projects to slow down.

Yards continued: "By redistributing water resources regionally, making them more evenly distributed, and expanding the boundaries of the Empire’s agriculture and ecology, this can be considered as opening new resources."

"And in the terminal water use areas, through technical means, controlling the water consumption and improving water use efficiency, this is frugality."

"We take the three southern provinces as experimental areas to explore regional water transfer projects. From Apington to Kimberley and Bloemfontein, then to Otto and Gaborone, and New Hamburg Port City east of the Drakensberg Mountains, Maputo forms a powerful southern city cluster, becoming a new economic pole of the Empire."

After discussing water-saving agriculture, the main discussion in the agricultural field of the East African Government is comprehensive land reform.

This topic mainly includes three aspects: first is soil improvement in farming areas, second is water and soil conservation in pasture areas, and finally, protection of ecological boundaries.

Berkeley, the Minister of Land Resources, said: "The Empire’s arable land area exceeds two billion mu, but such a large area also has a profound impact on our ecological environment."

"Regarding the issues within farming areas, unreasonable development and use have led to the decline of soil fertility, decreased grain yields, soil compaction, salinization, and other problems becoming more prominent. In some areas, it even triggered related natural disasters, such as dust storms and dust emissions."

"Therefore, for this, the Ministry of Land Resources believes that some unreasonable farming areas should be abolished, returning farmland to grasslands, forests, or even lakes and wetlands."

Apart from considering ecological perspectives, the Ministry of Land Resources also considers the current needs of East Africa’s economic development. With international grain prices continuously low, East Africa indeed has no need to further expand arable land size but should rather reduce it.

Berkeley continued: "And for the national arable land, scientific management methods and planting models should be formulated, adapting to local conditions."

"Our focus this time is on soil improvement; although East Africa has a large arable land area, the land quality, namely fertility, is not considered high worldwide."

"In the past, although we also carried out soil improvement work, due to inadequate understanding, lack of experience, and slow theoretical development, it did not achieve very good outcomes."

"Therefore, leveraging this new economic development period of the Five-Year Plan, promoting high-quality development in the agricultural field requires more emphasis on science and experimentation..."

Ernst fully agrees on this point. He said: "In the past, the Empire’s economic development was relatively rough, ignoring many real issues in pursuit of speed and quantity."

"By the stage of the Five-Year Plan, our economic character has undergone a radical change; further coarse and wild development will not only fail to have a positive effect on the national economy but would rather bury huge hidden dangers for the future."

"Therefore, from the start of the Five-Year Plan, our economic development should shift towards refinement. The government should also be more comprehensive in considering issues, rather than ignoring other issues for economic development like in the past."

...

Early 1921.

With the conclusion of East Africa Government’s economic development conference, East Africa’s fifth Five-Year Plan officially commenced in rural areas.

This time, the agricultural reform mainly starts from state-owned farms, plantations, and other production units in East Africa.

Since the market opened, rural areas in East Africa have also undergone radical changes, the most important of which is a large amount of land being privately contracted, especially for economic crops.

Economic crops are difficult to manage and cannot be fully mechanized, so many economic crop planting areas are leased by the East African Government to private entities, companies, or rural cooperatives.

As a result, East Africa’s control over rural areas has significantly weakened, or rather, administrative retreat from the agricultural production sector.

Apart from the staple crops and some economic crops, semi-privatization is quite serious in the East African agricultural sector. It is deemed semi-privatized because the ownership of the land still remains with the East African Government.

In Ernst’s philosophy, land should certainly not be completely privatized or completely nationalized; moving towards any extreme direction does not align with the doctrine of the mean.

Of course, based on historical experience, land continuously sways between these two directions, and Ernst’s historical experience naturally comes from five thousand years of historical experience of the Far East Empire.

For instance, during the slavery era, the Far East Empire was prevalent in the well-field system, the militia system in the early Southern and Northern Dynasties and Tang Dynasty, the guard system in the early Ming Dynasty, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’s "Heavenly Dynasty Land System"...

This cycle, to some extent, explains the upward spiral of history.

Therefore, in Ernst’s governance era, the economic field in East Africa also changes according to this pattern, from complete land nationalization in the last century to the emergence of large-scale land contract systems now, reflecting Ernst’s governance philosophy.

With the large-scale occurrence of land contracts, a large amount of arable land resources is still held by the East African Government, and in certain areas, especially grain planting and strategic agricultural material production areas, state-run farms and plantations still exist extensively.

This allows the East African Government to remain in a position to attack or retreat in the agricultural development field, maintaining the balanced area of national agricultural development.