An important factor limiting agricultural development in East Africa is the issue of soil fertility. It’s not that East Africa lacks relatively fertile land—for example, the volcanic ash soil distribution zone in the northern East African Plateau (mainly Kenya), the Great Lakes Region with its abundant water and soil resources, and the black soil belts in Mozambique, and so on.

But relatively barren land is also quite widespread in East Africa, especially in tropical rainforest and desert areas, so raising soil fertility all the more requires the participation of the chemical fertilizer industry.

Fortunately, during the First Five-Year Plan, East Africa’s framework for pesticide and fertilizer industries had basically been put in place, and during the Second Five-Year Plan, the chemical industry, as the weak link in East Africa’s basic industries, will receive much stronger support.

The chemical industry is not only related to agriculture-linked fields such as pesticides and fertilizers; it also involves the defense industry. Many chemical products are explosives by nature, or are used in other production links of the defense sector. Thus the chemical industry occupies an important position in East Africa’s Second Five-Year Plan; whether for agriculture or for light and heavy industry, the chemical industry is extremely important.

Of course, compared with countries like Germany, East Africa has many shortcomings in the chemical industry, but this depends on how you classify things. In East Africa, the petroleum industry should actually also be regarded as a category of the chemical industry, but because East Africa attaches special importance to petroleum, it is managed separately. East Africa’s petroleum industry is already quite developed, which also means East Africa occupies an advantageous position in petrochemicals. The same is true of the rubber industry, which is also highly related to chemicals, so the true level of East Africa’s chemical industry still remains to be fully assessed.

Of course, when it comes to the development of East Africa’s chemical industry, Ernst can’t play much of a role for the time being. He himself is very unfamiliar with this field; the fact that he can elevate the chemical industry to a strategic position within East Africa’s own industrial development is already quite remarkable.

For a country like East Africa, with a planned economic system, it is easiest to produce results when concentrating efforts on developing a particular field. So as long as the direction is not drastically wrong, with the advance of the Second Five-Year Plan, East Africa’s chemical industry will obviously make far greater progress than during the First Five-Year Plan.

Returning to the main topic, Ernst said to Fen Ge’er, "There’s a lot the Ministry of Agriculture can do, such as meteorological research, agricultural structure, breeding fine varieties, land improvement and remediation, and so on. Don’t just fix your eyes on agricultural machinery and the production of fertilizers and pesticides. When the industrial foundation has not reached a certain level, these things cannot appear out of thin air. As the Second Five-Year Plan advances, there will inevitably be developments, so don’t be overly anxious."

In raising agricultural yields, fertilizers and pesticides have the most obvious effect, but the other methods are not entirely useless—it’s just that increasing the use of fertilizers and pesticides produces results more easily.

Moreover, as someone who has lived through it before, Ernst, while aware of the importance of pesticides and fertilizers, also knows that sustainable agricultural development is indispensable.

"Fertilizers and pesticides—especially pesticide production—must be handled with caution. The safety of many pesticides is not clearly established, so we cannot rely entirely on pesticides to guarantee crop protection. Being harmless to agricultural products does not mean being harmless to the human body or to the ecosystem. To put it bluntly, if some pesticides are not handled properly, then they’re just poisons. If they contaminate water sources and soil on a large scale, the consequences will be unimaginable!"

At this point, even Ernst broke out in a cold sweat. He suddenly realized he hadn’t paid attention to the issue of production safety in the chemical industry for quite a long time.

East Africa built a large number of chemical plants during the First Five-Year Plan; it’s by no means certain that these plants are free of safety hazards. It seems that later he must specifically remind the relevant departments and have them carry out a sweeping inspection of East Africa’s chemical sector.

Safety hazards in the chemical industry are no trifling matter. In his previous life, both the United States and India experienced extremely serious chemical disasters, especially the Bhopal gas leak in India, which, because of its massive casualties, was recorded in history textbooks.

The Bhopal gas disaster in India caused at least 25,000 direct deaths, 550,000 indirect deaths, and more than 200,000 people permanently disabled—worse than the extreme high temperatures in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And the Bhopal gas disaster was caused by a pesticide plant in India funded by the United States in his previous life. If a disaster of that scale were to break out in East Africa, it would be almost equivalent to the entire population of Dar es Salaam perishing, since the total population of Dar es Salaam City is only a little over eight hundred thousand.

Moreover, who can be sure how much India and the United States concealed about the Bhopal gas disaster in that previous world? The more than 700,000 casualties and deaths openly acknowledged alone were enough to shock the entire world. At that time, the Soviet Union, the United States’ mortal enemy, still existed, and the Bhopal gas disaster was closely tied to the United States.

The more Ernst thought about it, the more horrific it seemed. The global chemical industry is currently in a rather rough-and-ready developmental stage, and East Africa is no exception. After all, humanity’s understanding of chemical substances is far from sufficient, so it is very necessary to carry out a comprehensive nationwide investigation of the chemical sector.

After concluding his conversation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Ernst then summoned the department in charge of the chemical industry for talks.

Ernst stated bluntly, "The development of the chemical industry cannot be sloppy. Some chemicals pose potential hazards such as toxicity and explosion risks, so production safety in the chemical industry is an important component of its development during the Second Five-Year Plan. Including the layout of the chemical industry, you must review your original plans for gaps and omissions and promptly rectify unreasonable layouts of some chemical plants."

The industrial department did not immediately agree with what Ernst said, but replied, "Your Highness, the problem is that some of our projects have already started construction. If we begin again from scratch, the losses will be too great."

Ernst naturally understood this point as well. He said, "Projects that have already broken ground will, for the time being, proceed according to plan. However, we must raise construction standards, formulate strict production procedures, and properly handle waste materials."

The Second Five-Year Plan has already begun to be implemented, and some projects had even started construction at the end of the First Five-Year Plan, with half the work already completed. At this point, it’s naturally impossible to overturn everything; they can only adopt a delaying tactic and wait a few years to resolve these potential hazards through industrial and technological upgrading.

Since they were discussing the rectification of production safety in the chemical industry, other industrial sectors naturally could not be left out.

Ernst stressed, "In the past, during construction projects, we were accustomed to using Black laborers for certain risky jobs, but this is not feasible in the industrial field. After all, these Black laborers lack professional training and may cause serious problems in production links."

After all, the reason the Bhopal gas disaster in his previous life occurred in India had a lot to do with the quality of Indian employees. From Ernst’s understanding of Indians, they tend to be rather perfunctory, especially in the military sphere—crashing planes and sinking ships at the drop of a hat. If they were a normal country, they ought to be ashamed beyond measure.

When even the military—the department that should value discipline and regulations the most—can get away with sloppiness, other industries and government departments in India certainly can’t be much better. So the fact that the Bhopal disaster happened in India is entirely reasonable.

Although East African Black people are not Indians, in this era their understanding of things is probably still inferior to that of Indians. Indians, after all, saw quite a bit of the world under British rule, while East African Black people have been toiling for East Africa as beasts of burden for only a few decades.

"Of course, besides Black laborers, we must also strengthen safety education for our own people, reinforce training in production, and formulate and supervise the implementation of regulations. There is no such thing as a trivial matter in production safety, especially in the chemical industry and some other industries that carry certain risks."

Under Ernst’s incessant lecturing, East Africa’s industrial departments launched discussions and research on the issue of "production safety." This also meant that during the Second Five-Year Plan, the workload of both government and enterprises increased further. However, it did indeed cause East Africa, in this new round of industrial development, to tighten up and curb the previously rough-and-ready style of industrial growth.