Three days later, the number of applicants exceeded ten million.
Immigration without a threshold was first welcomed by the poor people of Africa and the Middle East. Those who more or less had contact with the Internet and were eager for a better life in the outside world were particularly enthusiastic about signing up.
However, Jiang Chen failed their expectations.
For volunteers from underdeveloped areas, Celestial Trade adopted an extremely cautious attitude. Only a few applicants were accepted from Africa, and slightly more Middle East applicants were accepted for interviews.
This decision wasn’t because of racial discrimination but rather, because of considerations such as laws, living habits, religious practices, and even food culture, all of which might present hidden dangers to colonization. In order to reduce this risk, any applicants who rejected secularization didn’t receive an interview.
After the results of the interview came out, Liu Qingpeng couldn’t even believe he was accepted as someone with only a high school degree!
Happiness came too suddenly. On the same day, he excitedly took out several well-connected workers from the factory and went on a drinking binge. He resigned to the factory’s director the next day then he went to Xin’s Embassy with his identity card to receive a Coro Island work visa.
Dragging his suitcase at Coro Island Airport, he quickly saw the buses that were picking up volunteers.
There were people all over the world on the buses, but due to language barriers, he could only curiously look at them and didn’t communicate with them as much as he would have liked.
The buses boarded a ferry then the ferry stopped at Ange Island. The buses then transported them to the volunteer community next to the training center.
From now on, they would live there. They would receive four hours of on-site training every day, and four hours of VR training.
After six months, they would be separated into different jobs for specialized training according to their performance during training. A year later, their status would be changed from temporary workers. Although they would still be volunteers, they could be viewed as quasi-astronauts.
The construction of the space elevator would start simultaneously with the lunar colonization program. A year later, Celestial trade would select 200 of these volunteers as the first settlers to the moon. This would be the first step toward the astounding intergalactic settlement!
After the completion of the space elevator, a large number of astronauts would be needed at the space station.
The astronaut training center started construction at the same time as the space elevator program. On one hand, it was meant to provide staff for the space station. On the other hand, it was meant to carry out basic aerospace training for the citizens of Xin; they had to at least adapt to non-gravity environments!
“Up until now, 30,000 volunteers have arrived in Xin to receive training. Although cooperation with Future Tourism has begun, the entire space training center is still at a loss. According to estimates from the Finance Department, the deficit of the space training center this month is about 8 to 10 million.”
“We’ll lose 100 million a year?”
Jiang Chen’s expression didn’t change much after he digested Xia Shiyu’s words.
The aerospace project was a bottomless pit. He had long been prepared to lose money. Since he already committed more than 100 billion US Dollar, would he care about a mere 100 million?
“The budget of the training center remains unchanged, but let Wei Yun think about it a bit more and see if he can make better use of this space training center for tourism. Don’t aim for profitability; just don’t lose too much money.”
“I’ll tell him.” Xia Shiyu nodded.
“In addition, what happened to the negotiations with Australia’s SunRice?” Putting the astronaut training aside, Jiang Chen asked another question he was concerned about: the food supply to the future space elevator station and the moon’s colonial base.
“SunRice rejected our offer for the acquisition of the farm in Northern Australia, even though we offered a premium of 11%. According to the person responsible for negotiating with us at SunRice, this decision was made by the parent company Cargill.”
It was no secret that 80 percent of the world’s food market was controlled by the four big companies “A,B,C,D”. The companies were ADM in the UA, Bunge in the UA, Cargill in the UA, and Louis Dreyfus in France. It could be said that global food prices were basically determined by these four companies.
Interested people could easily see that three of them belonged to the UA. It was fair to state that the global food market was basically under the control of the UA. Although the UA had never announced that the grain market must be settled using USD, the rice in everyone’s bowls had never left the control of the UA.
During the 2004 soybean crisis, the Hua enterprises collectively collapsed, and they were taught a painful “trade lesson” who had joined the WTO for less than three years. Today, more than ten years later, the soybean industry in Hua hadn’t rebounded from the crisis.
It should be noted that before 2004, Hua was one of the major soybean exporters.
Now that it was no longer the barbarous Victorian era, the battlefields had long not relied on swords and machetes. By using invisible leverage in the market, they could achieve things that even nuclear weapons couldn’t do.
Whether it was the orbital space station or the moon base, the only industry where it was difficult to be self-sufficient was food production. Even if methods like hydroponic were used, it would be difficult to control the high production costs.
With the space elevator, the cost of transporting food to outer space would be greatly reduced, but at the source, it would still be difficult to minimize control from the four ABCD companies.
At present, Xin’s food supply mostly relied on imports from Australia. If Jiang Chen attacked the US Dollar, the UA would undoubtedly beat Xin through the grain market.
With Xin completely depending on the import of grains and dairy products, the country virtually had no defense in the food market.
There was only one way to minimize the impact of price fluctuations in the international market – producing their own food. They needed to transform themselves from an importing country to an exporting nation! Even if rice wasn’t grown on Coro Island, it had to be grown on an overseas farm controlled by Xin’s own companies.
Being self-sufficient in food production was crucial for the future development of Celestial Trade, so Jiang Chen asked Xia Shiyu to propose an acquisition of SunRice, a company that monopolized Australian grain exports, hoping to acquire 400,000-acre farm in northern Australia.
Unfortunately, Cargill, which controlled SunRice, wasn’t willing to give up its farm, although the 400,000-acre farm accounted for only a small portion of the land owned by SunRice.
“Did we get in touch with Cargill?”
“They aren’t willing to talk at all.” Xia Shiyu shook her head. “My advice is to register a subsidiary in Australia and acquire a farm from an Australian farmer through a subsidiary… Although the cost and efficiency of doing so isn’t directly proportional, it’s certainly easier than pulling teeth from a tiger’s mouth.”
As one of the granaries in Asia, Australia’s agricultural market was quite mature. There would be no farmers willing to sell their farms. After all, many Australian farmers had been farmers for generations. If they lost their farms, they couldn’t find any other work.
Unless Future Group offered a very high premium, they wouldn’t agree.
Jiang Chen had no solutions.
Everything else was good about Xin aside from the lack of land. He hadn’t thought so far ahead when he chose the island. He thought that with globalization, he could buy anything with money. But when he had a big country to run, he realized things were far more difficult than he imagined.
[So much trouble. Only if I could replace thousands of square kilometers of sea with land… Hold on!]
As he thought of this, his eyes light up.
[Why not just build farms on the sea?]
ADM, Bunge, Cargill and (Louis) Dreyfus accounted for between 75% and 90% of the global grain trade.
