1. Russia has developed a trillion-dollar economy in oil and today it is de facto the largest oil producer in the world.
   
   
2. Russia developed these gas reserves to such a level that it's largest company, Gasprom, which happens to be by now the third largest company in the world, is supplying at least one-third of Europe with natural gas.
   
   
3. The liberated China, the China which liberated itself from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, today has monetary reserves of at least $2.5 trillion and, in fact, it is the world's largest international banker. The Chinese are now de facto creating the One China policy which basically says that Hong Kong, Taiwan, China are working together on a daily basis and that cooperation is creating an industrial but particularly monetary colossus. Only some hundred years ago JP Morgan created in the United States.
   
   
4. The food crisis brought forward the picture and the concept of Africa. Africa to some extent is the richest continent in the world. It is represented in almost every mineral, it has 600 million inhabitants, and an uneducated population which has shown at every level that people are willing to get educated and today are willing to work. Many foreign investments have been made in Africa: Copper in the Belgian Congo, aluminum in Katanga, gold mining in Mali and the Ivory Coast and the old Abyssinia. Actually, Africa created the second, Ghana, and the third, Tanzania, largest gold producer in the Continent. It is easy to see that with the development of the mines and the high commodity prices, the cash flow enables many African governments to develop the infrastructure.
   
   

I would like to state with my personal experience and many visits to Africa, that very few African governments want to join terrorists or old-fashioned communist theories.

I would like to state that in 2008, some forty years later, if there was a free election all over Africa, they would say that they want to get rid of HIV, they want to get educated, and they are willing to work. The rich land of Africa and 600 million people should be taken seriously.

Tanzania is a poor country. However, in the last few months a revolution has taken place in the financial markets and point out that Africa can take, and Tanzania in particular can take, a great role in increasing the world's food production which is heading towards a major disaster of historical proportion.

In my capacity as International Monetary Advisor to Douglas Lake, I had many conversations with members of the Tanzanian embassy, the Minister of Economic and Trade Affairs, and the Deputy Chief, Minister Plenipotentiary Consular, as well.

Tanzania wants to develop its agriculture. As usual, the people who arrive first are those who want to exploit what they call the colonialist version of the past and the future. A large amount of land had been purchased by speculators getting leases for ten years and wanting to produce biofuels. This is wrong.

A number of speculators also arrived from companies in the West, claiming to have large territories of minerals or agriculture under contract, raise money, issue themselves millions of shares and invest a small amount in Tanzania. The profit is the insider shares they sell and the money they raise in the West is solely paid out as expenditures.

I have recommended to my company's board and I trust this will be presented formally to the Tanzanian government, that we want to develop more minerals and more agriculture. Dar es Salaam actually has a stock market. It is a stock market of only six stocks and eight debentures. However, it can be expanded. What I recommended is to form a company registered both in Tanzania and in the United States, raise a certain amount of money and identify land holdings and acquire land, and identify agricultural production. This company should be owned let's say 60 percent by Douglas Lake, 20 percent by an agency of the Tanzanian government, and 20 percent reserved for private placements.

Having established our objectives and having made our projections and our forecast, we would then raise additional capital either for the new company, which is 60 percent owned, and acquire more land and actually put some agricultural production into action.

The simple step which would represent a minute percentage of the agricultural production capability of Tanzania, can be a revolutionary cooperation because it could be delivering agricultural products to the markets, it would participate in the obvious increase in price of the land, and at the same time would benefit not only by spending money but by stock holdings of the Tanzanian people whose gross national product is minuscule, $1,000 a year, and whose 40 million inhabitants would be the happy beneficiaries of this activity.

It doesn't take too much imagination but a little research to indicate that the possibilities I describe can be multiplied by not only hundreds but thousands, and therefore out initial company could become a meaningful entity which is not only producing agricultural goods desperately needed in the world, but at the same time is delivering monies, stocks and hope for the 40 million inhabitants of Tanzania.

This and only this kind of relationship can bring a permanent relationship between entrepreneurial companies, foreign investors, the Tanzania government and the Tanzanian people, and at the same time deliver some food products to a starving world.

I purposefully do not wish to throw around numbers because the possibilities are very large. However, I make a prediction that if this company, which I call Tanzanian Agriculture, is successful, both the parent, Douglas Lake, and Tanzanian Agriculture will attract large amounts of foreign money.

The 21st century is for change. The 21st century basically benefits from American foreign policy that overthrew the Soviet Union, overthrew communism. It began in 1972 when President Nixon, in February of that year, shook hands with Prime Minister Chou En Lai. We have to continue this trend. If we look back to development of China between 1972 and 2008, and we attach numbers to the land values on each company, if we attach numbers to the personal income of the average person in China in the two years, we can then calculate the possibility of African land, agriculture, Western ingenuity for the remaining part of the century.

(Article 91 - posted June 25, 2008)

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