Wood, mines, but also banana plantations, intensive pig farms on land stolen from forests or steppes violated to the core to appropriate rare and increasingly precious metals. And favor the exploitation of the planet. From 2010 onwards, emerging countries, especially the poorest ones, have the possession of land was given to the rich for 33 million hectares, more or less the equivalent of the entire Italian territory. The calculation is by Land Matrix, a non-governmental organization which has scrutinized 1.865 international contracts, often deliberately opaque and ambiguous, and which on September 28 will hold a public webinar with the eloquent title "The great race to land: few advantages for development, many risks for man and the environment”. An indictment from which a culprit emerges: the China.
It's not just Beijing, for heaven's sake, that proceeds with the systematic exploitation of the few green lungs of the planet. But the numbers don't lie: compared to the one and a half million hectares controlled by British companies, often a legacy of the old empire, or the 860 hectares in the hands of American corporations and the 400 hectares of Japanese groups, there are now 6,5 million hectares of agricultural land, forests and mines ended up in the hands of the Chinese within a few years, from 2010 onwards. A rapid and silent advance that has allowed Beijing to buy the equivalent of around the world a country the size of Lithuania. Or of Sri Lanka, to quote a nation now trapped by debts contracted under the flattery of the Silk Road: a trap, because it Sri Lanka, unable to repay the sums against investments that ultimately proved unsustainable, was forced to relinquish full sovereignty over the port of Colombo and the only highway for 99 years.
A silent but eerie march. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also for the environmental consequences. Sure, Beijing just announced its country will stop building new ones coal-fired power plants abroad and will seek to promote more environmentally friendly methods of energy production in developing countries. But the change of course, on closer inspection, has more economic reasons than ideal ones. Between 2014 and 2020 China has invested 160 billion dollars in new coal-fired power plant projects overseas. In recent years, however, several projects had been abandoned, and China's approval of new overseas coal-fired power plant projects had stopped altogether in the past year. Xi's announcement, therefore, is the officialization of a policy that has already been implemented for some months now, and also dictated by economic reasons behind which there is in any case hunger for agricultural resources and raw materials which is the first concern of the Celestial Empire.
Let's take for example the intensive cultivation of bananas in the state of Kachin, in the northern part of Burma. Under the influence of Chinese investments, the forest has given way to large three-metre-high banana trees which have radically changed the landscape. According to the UN, banana exports have multiplied 250 times over the past seven years, from one and a half million dollars in 2014 to 370 million dollars, almost all exported to China. A trend that has not changed since the military coup last February.
Burma is certainly not an isolated case. There Bin Phuoc province of Vietnam it has always been an important center for the production of natural rubber. But this activity is now threatened by the "New Hope Liuhe", the Chinese cattle giant that it created a huge pig farm (75 hectares)., according to a model that has already been replicated in other regions of the country with the aim of satisfying the appetite of the Chinese, big consumers of pork. And of timber to feed the building industry. Hence the intensive exploitation of the forests of the Congo, fully exploited by the Wang Peng group as the prices of the raw material rose in the spring. Also in Africa, the pressure on the mines is mounting: China Minmetals has been awarded the exclusive rights to the research in Tanzania. In Guinea, the scene of a coup d'état in the summer, China Non-Ferrous Mining has invested 730 million to secure reserves of lithium and other strategic minerals for electric car batteries. And so on.
In short, the new Cold War is not fought only with submarines, but also, if not above all, with the control of agricultural raw materials and energy supplies, which are also vital for agriculture, as we are discovering in recent days: the soaring prices of natural gas have already caused the closure of several factories producing fertilizers and other derivatives in Europe, including ammonia, among the other essential for beer foam.
