₦airaland Forum

Oga Reno,

I throway salute! You can only give what you have and Boy! you were very right on the money.

Enjoy!

Pavore9:
It is still way below Mpesa and Airtelmoney level as my Mpesa and Airtelmoney are not linked to any bank account and l used them to receive international transfers and use the debit cards inked to them to shop on the internet but l hope the coming years will see us leap.

There is a reason why ours is infantile. Recall that the Deposit Money Bank in Nigeria (a formidable cartel); arm-twisted all the Telecos that started mobile money initiatives in the beginning, and lobbied the CBN with much success. They are unwilling have this initiative work without them being in the middle.

GEJ is NOT in hiding. Anybody who wants to arrest him is free to do so.

Hello People,

over the past 3 months, I have noticed that the quantity of table salt I put in my cooking has dramatically increased without any corresponding increase in the salt taste of the food.

I thought that my mind was playing tricks on me, but recent confirmation by 2 of my colleagues and a family friend and even the Mama-Put where I eat lunch at work; who all purchased the same brand of salt but from different markets around Abuja is giving me serious cause for concern.

What have the put in the salt, is it the normal Table salt or is it adulterated?

These observations are within Abuja environment.

Has anybody else also noticed this?

But, but, I thought it was ok to save all your salary and buy apartments in Dubai for over $1m. I am confused now. Somebody please explain .........

emeka2847:
[size=38pt]But who are the owners of these refineries? [/size]

[size=38pt]Wrong Question.

Ask the government to license and regulate these small businesses. Give them crude oil legally, regulate them to protect the environment and tax them to grow revenue.

If we do this, importation of petroleum products will disappear. Not to talk of the jobs that will be created.[/size]

@peterbabs

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I was driving in Abuja (around Secretariat, CBD) when I saw an insect perching on my windshield that looked exactly like the BSF that I have seen online in pictures and videos.

There you have it people, confirmed sightings in Middlebelt Region and Western Region. At least it is found in Nigeria. Big Money is smelling

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-06-07/putin-is-growing-organic-power-one-t-34-tank-tomato-at-a-time


Deep in the Caucasus, downriver from Europe’s highest peak, North Korean women roam Soviet-era hothouses growing what tycoon Vladimir Evtushenkov is betting will be his next big bounty: the T-34 battle tomato.

The plump hybrids, named for the fearsome tank that helped trounce Hitler, are the pride of the Yuzhny Agricultural Complex, a mass of greenhouses the size of 2,300 football fields between the Black and Caspian seas. Watered by melting ice from towering Mount Elbrus, they and other strains of the fruit are grown here by the millions and trucked mainly to Moscow, 18 hours’ journey north.

Evtushenkov, at 67 the oldest of the top 40 Russians in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has impeccable timing. His AFK Sistema, which invests in everything from cellular services to medical clinics, acquired Yuzhny in December, the same month Vladimir Putin re-affirmed achieving food self-sufficiency by 2020 as a national goal. And unlike Josef Stalin’s first five-year plan, which led to the Great Famine, Putin is dangling profit rather than prison to motivate the masses. Once a totem of communism, T-34 is now a symbol of patriotic capitalism.

“This is a very promising area,” Evtushenkov said in an interview.

War’s Blessing

Stung by oil’s collapse, the ruble’s plunge, financial sanctions over Ukraine and the longest recession of his 16-year rule, Putin, 63, is seeking to minimize Russia’s reliance on markets he can’t control. Counter-sanctions imposed on food imports and an unprecedented raft of subsidies have made many areas of farming more profitable than even crude, which Putin once called Russia’s “golden goose.” Food prices have soared along with inflation, which is running almost double the central bank’s 4 percent goal, shifting even more wealth from hard-hit consumers to well-connected producers.

Take Ros Agro Plc, the sugar and meat producer controlled by billionaire Vadim Moshkovich. It last year received about 3 billion rubles ($46 million) in state support and paid zero tax on profits, helping to boost its net earnings margin to 33 percent, 28 points more than oil major Lukoil PJSC. The company’s Moscow-listed shares have almost doubled in the last year.


Putin has even turned war in the Middle East into a blessing for growers.

After Turkey downed a Russian fighter jet along the Syrian border in November, Moscow responded by banning a range of produce from its former ally, leading authorities to broadcast videos of inspectors enthusiastically bulldozing Turkish tomatoes. Just a few weeks later, with Yuzhny’s biggest competitor swept from the market, Evtushenkov acquired the complex and the organic tomatoes and cucumbers it produces for an undisclosed sum.

Health, Wealth

“Russia is able to become the world’s largest supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food, which Western producers have long lost,” Putin told parliament after the Turkish ban was imposed.

Russia last year joined dozens of nations in banning the commercial planting of genetically modified organisms and has since barred GMO imports -- putting Putin at the vanguard of an increasingly vocal global movement.

But the crowning achievement of his food strategy so far is grain. Russia overtook the U.S. this year to become the biggest exporter of wheat -- a milestone that followed bumper yields of corn, rice, soybeans and buckwheat.These strong harvests and Putin’s financial incentives have set off a land rush in the fabled Black Earth belt of central Russia and other fertile regions.

“The two hottest investments for rich Russians are farmland and European hotels,” said Yevgenia Tyurikova, the head of private banking at state-run Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender. “This trend is absolutely new.”

Plum Assignment

Phosagro OJSC fertilizer tycoon Andrey Guryev, real estate magnate Samvel Karapetyan, United Co. Rusal chief Oleg Deripaska and Putin ally Gennady Timchenko are just a few of the wealthy Russians who are riding the wave. Another big beneficiary of the boom may be the agriculture minister, Alexander Tkachev.

After Tkachev was promoted from governor of the southern Krasnodar region last year, Putin called on “our” producers to fill “our” markets “quickly” -- and the new minister was happy to oblige.

His family’s Agrocomplex JSC owned 200,000 hectares of arable land when he became minister, according to data compiled by consultancy BEFL. Now it has 456,000 hectares, four times the size of New York City and one of Russia’s 10 largest landholdings. The company’s net income, including from dairy and chicken farms, tripled between 2013 and 2015 to 6.6 billion rubles.


There’s plenty more to go around. By some estimates Russia has more than 40 million hectares of idle land suitable for growing, an area about the size of Iraq. Putin has urged the state to consider giving some of it away to create more farmers, the opposite of Stalin’s disastrous collectivization.

Even if sanctions weren’t in place, oil’s sudden crash and the sliding value of the ruble were a clear wake-up call that Russia can no longer afford to dither when it comes to developing its other innate superpower -- land, said Marat Ibragimov, an analyst at BCS Global Markets in Moscow.

"It’s becoming harder and harder to explain to the electorate why people have to buy imported cucumbers and tomatoes, given how much land Russia has,” Ibragimov said.

Bitter History

Turning the world’s largest country into a food colossus is a goal with a long history that faces an equally lengthy list of challenges. Soviet leaders from Lenin to Khrushchev all sought to impose sweeping changes on the industry, often with tragic results. Agriculture was haphazardly privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union a quarter century ago, with many large collective farms splintering into small plots whose owners struggled to keep pace with technology.

Today many farms are inefficient, with cows producing as much as two-and-a-half times less milk than in some other countries, according to Kirill Dmitriev, who runs the state-backed Russian Direct Investment Fund, or RDIF. Roads and other infrastructure are poor, high-tech equipment scarce and there’s little production of key products like beef and cheese.


A lot of growers “are in a lot of debt, not in particularly good shape, and often are not in the right place” because of dubious Soviet planning, said Richard Connolly, who studies the Russian economy at Chatham House in London. “They require a hell of a lot more than simply getting people to put their money in.”

Still, the grain surplus, combined with the weaker ruble, helped lift food exports to a record $20 billion in 2015, more than the country earned from arms sales. Altogether, agricultural output increased 3 percent last year, helping to trim the overall economic contraction to 3.7 percent. And as exports advance, imports retreat. Russia has slashed international food purchases by about 40 percent since 2013, to $26.5 billion last year.

“If someone were to ask me what the most proper and profitable business to invest in now is, I’d say agriculture,” said Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB officer turned businessman who co-owns Russia’s biggest potato grower.

Mideast Toehold

Putin isn’t relying on rich Russians alone to drive expansion. Russia is also courting companies in Asia and the Middle East -- the only real option since other large economies have imposed sanctions. The RDIF is creating a $2 billion fund with China to invest in agricultural projects, and last month formed a joint venture with Thailand’s CP Group to build Russia’s largest integrated dairy complex. It’s also working with Egyptian banks to create an export hub for Russian grain on the Suez Canal.

If successful, these efforts will go some way toward meeting Putin’s stated goal of re-orienting economic ties away from the West and toward emerging markets.


It’s a sign of the importance Putin places on slashing reliance on foreign goods and turning a moribund industry into a rare source of growth and steady employment that Evtushenkov has been given free rein to expand.

Just two years ago, the billionaire was placed under house arrest during an investigation into the ownership of Bashneft PJSC, the oil producer he gained control over after his ally, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, became president in 2008. He wasn’t released until a Moscow court ordered the company nationalized. Putin served as premier under Medvedev until 2012, when the two men switched jobs again.

‘Drown the World’

Now Sistema, which spent about 9 billion rubles on agricultural expansion last year, is shopping for more land and seeking to become one of Russia’s top five milk producers. The company is also modernizing Yuzhny, which will entail hiring more local laborers to replace its 100 or so North Korean “guest workers,” a legacy of Soviet trade with the Hermit Kingdom. The facility is showing its age; some buildings are old enough to still bear rousing slogans like “Communism is the youth of the world!” Power accounts for almost a third of production costs because even in southern Russia the mercury drops too much at night for plants to grow sustainably.

“We have big plans” for agriculture, Sistema CEO Mikhail Shamolin said, citing opportunities to crank up cheesemaking, put fresh tomatoes on tables from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, and “drown the world” in tasty Russian apples.


Yet even as Putin rallies magnates to his cause, the hard slog of turning Russian farming around will fall, as it always has, on the shoulders of workers like 57-year-old Sekhernaz Akhmedova. She’s been employed at Yuzhny since the 1980s, first for the Soviet government, then for state banks in Moscow and now Evtushenkov, slicing cucumbers from vines with a knife so small it seems grafted to her fist.

Asked if achieving Putin’s goal of total self-sufficiency depends on workers like herself, she shrugged.

"We work hard and fulfill the plans," Akhmedova said. "I only wish they would give me a raise."

—With assistance from Irina Reznik, Alex Sazonov and Andrey Lemeshko.

The role as world reserve currency is something no financial hegemon in history has willingly surrendered. It took two world wars for the City of London and Bank of England to reluctantly concede hegemony of the Pound Sterling to the Dollar. As Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked decades ago, “If you control the money, you can control the entire world.” Whether or not Kissinger ever said that publicly, he and his patron, David Rockefeller, certainly believed it. Now, with US government debt shooting past $19 trillion and the true state of the American economy and its infrastructure at its worst since the Great Depression, with most Americans living on the brink of financial disaster, the brilliant financial engineers of Wall Street and Washington have once again come up with a scheme to prolong the role of Dollar as King in the world economy.

The recent Panama Papers revelations by a select group of Western mainstream media including the New York Times, BBC and Süddeutsche Zeitung, were notable as a brazen attempt to attack foreign leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping for alleged corruption. Notably, the leaked files of the Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, so far have failed to leak even one significant name of a US citizen hiding money in offshore accounts of the Panama facilitators.

While the world’s eyes were on the identities of alleged offshore money holders, they failed to consider the longer-term consequence of the huge revelations. The one country so far to benefit from the Panama Papers revelations is the country that is rapidly becoming the new “Panama” or better, the new Switzerland, namely the United States of America, the initiator of attacks on other hot money havens offshore over the past two decades.

Golden Dollar Era

Over the past seventy two years ever since the US and select wartime allied governments met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to decide the shape of the postwar monetary order, the US dollar has reigned supreme in the world economy. By end of the War in 1945 the US Federal Reserve held the overwhelming bulk of world monetary gold.

As war erupted in Europe in September 1939 with Hitler’s and Stalin’s dismemberment of Poland, European gold was flooding into the United States. In 1935 US official gold reserves had been valued at just over $9 billion. By 1940 after the onset of war in Europe, they had risen to $20 billion. As desperate European countries sought to finance their war effort, their gold went to the United States to purchase essential goods. By the time of the June 1944 convening of the international monetary conference at Bretton Woods, the United States controlled fully 70% of the world’s monetary gold, an impressive advantage. That 70% did not even include calculating the captured gold of the defeated Axis powers of Germany or Japan, where exact facts and data were buried in layers of deception and rumor.

For the following quarter century, the gold-backed US dollar reigned supreme as the rest of the world, especially war-ravaged Western Europe, scrambled to find dollars to pay US imported goods to rebuild their industrial base. The dollar was literally “as good as good,” much as the Pound Sterling had been a century earlier.

Yet by the end of the 1960’s the dollar world had undergone significant change. The economies of France and especially of West Germany had emerged with a new state-of-the-art industrial base and was rapidly becoming an export power challenging American obsolescent industrial goods. The US industrial base had last undergone substantial modernization some three decades before. Europe and later Japan, were posing a competitive challenge to US industry. More alarming for Wall Street banks like David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan, Citibank or JPMorgan, as US trade dollar earnings of German companies like Mercedes, VW or BMW or Siemens were accumulating in the coffers of the German Bundesbank or Bank of France during the 1960’s an alarming change in policy emerged.

French President Charles de Gaulle, acting on advice of his conservative financial adviser, Jacques Rueff, ordered the Bank of France to begin to redeem its rapidly accumulating trade surplus dollars for gold, something then legal under the rules of Bretton Woods. The conservative German Bundesbank followed in demanding US gold for dollars. In 1968 in one of the first crude versions of their Color Revolutions, the CIA and US State Department toppled President de Gaulle in the events known as the May 1968 student revolt. Despite the replacement of de Gaulle by former Rothschild banker, Georges Pompidou, the foreign demand for Federal Reserve gold redemptions increased as Washington budget deficits to finance the ill-conceived Vietnam War exploded.

By August 1971, President Nixon was advised by his Assistant Treasury secretary, Paul Volcker, a former executive at Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, to essentially tear up the Bretton Woods Treaty and declare the US dollar a free-floating paper no longer redeemable in gold. The Federal Reserve’s gold reserves over the previous several years had been drained by foreign central banks fearful of the import of US dollar inflation as Washington refused pleas to devalue the dollar to re-stabilize the system. Rueff and France were calling for a 100% dollar devaluation against the Franc or Deutschmark.

Petrodollar era is born

By 1973, in developments I describe in detail in my book, A Century of War, as well as in Myths, Lies & Oil Wars, Wall Street and the Federal Reserve “solved” the problem of a dollar in free-fall—it had devalued some 40% against the Franc, D-mark and Yen after August, 1971—by orchestrating, with the skillful and deceitful diplomacy of then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, an OPEC oil price embargo following outbreak of the October, 1973 Yom Kippur War. By early 1974 the price of OPEC oil had been set some 400% above that of 1971. The dollar value soared against other major currencies as Germany, France and the rest of the oil-hungry world scrambled to find 400% more dollars to import their oil. Kissinger at the time wrote about “recycling petrodollars.” The dollar would be backed, not by gold, but by oil.

To be certain that the petrodollar system held, and that OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, would never be tempted to sell for D-marks, Francs or Yen as those countries tried, Washington took special measures. On June 8 1974, US Secretary of State

Henry Kissinger signed an agreement establishing a US-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. Its official mandate was co-operation in the field of finance.”

By December 1974 the US Treasury had signed an agreement in Riyadh with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, whose mission was, “to establish a new relationship through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with the (US) Treasury borrowing operation. Under this arrangement, SAMA will purchase new US Treasury securities with maturities of at least one year,” explained Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Jack F. Bennett, later to become a director of Exxon. Wall Street banker, David Mulford of Credit Suisse-FirstBoston was sent by Washington to SAMA in to seal the deal.

Bennett’s memo was addressed to Secretary of State Kissinger, dated February 1975, explaining the arrangements agreed two months before. As part of the secret agreements between Washington and Riyadh negotiated by Bennett, Saudi Arabia, in return for generous US defense equipment purchases and guarantees of its military security, agreed that OPEC would accept only US dollars for their oil, not German Marks despite their clear value, not Japanese Yen nor French Francs or even Swiss Francs, but only American dollars.

That was the essence of the petrodollar system which over the past decade or more has been eroding as Russia, China, Iran and even the EU challenge the role of the dollar as reserve currency. Russia and China, in a defensive move have agreed to energy trade for oil and gas paid not in dollars but in own currencies. Iran recently announced it will accept only Euros for its oil. More and more the days of the dollar demise are being proclaimed.

A new Narco-dollar system?

Now, however, it appears the financial wizards of Wall Street and the US Treasury have come up with a new life-extension idea.

In what must be termed at least a clever attempt to solve the looming crisis of the dollar, a new role of the dollar is emerging from the rubble of the offshore banking crisis triggered by the suspicious hacking of the Panama Papers. The under-regulated United States is rapidly becoming the “new Switzerland” in attracting “hot money” which includes everything from narco dollars from the international drug traffic to hiding of funds offshore by corrupt politicians.

For the past decade or more the US Government and revenue agency have pressured discreet offshore banking centers from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands to British Virgin Islands and beyond allegedly to clamp down on US tax-evading citizens hiding money abroad from the IRS or terrorists moving money to finance Al Qaeda and the likes. But the US government itself has rigidly refused to abide by the new international money reporting rules it caused to be created.

Now, according to a January report in the Bloomberg financial magazine, the result is that the United States itself, in places like Reno, Nevada or South Dakota or Wyoming, are fast becoming the “new Switzerland” hot or secret money havens.

Bloomberg quotes a Zurich attorney, Peter A. Cotorceanu, a lawyer at Anaford AG, “The USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour…That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”

The attraction of secrecy havens inside the US comes from the fact that a very strict money reporting standard set out by the Paris-Based OECD in 2014 has not been signed by four countries: Bahrain, Nauru, Vanuatu—and, guess who…the United States.

In the last months, taking advantage of the Washington hypocrisy, some of the world’s largest private banking managers including Rothschild Trust North America LLC. based in Reno, Nevada. Geneva-based Cisa Trust Co. SA, which advises wealthy Latin Americans, is applying to open in Pierre, South Dakota to “serve the needs of our foreign clients,” said John J. Ryan Jr., Cisa’s president.

Trident Trust Co., one of the world’s biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland, Grand Cayman, and other locales and into Sioux Falls, South Dakota in December, ahead of a January 1 disclosure deadline. Commenting on the new phenomenon, Andrew Penney of Rothschild & Co. stated that the US “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.”

Making the process even more positive for the dollar, a 2010 USA law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, requires financial firms to disclose foreign accounts held by US citizens and report them to the IRS or face steep penalties. With the US refusing to sign the OECD disclosure rules, US offshore dollars are also flooding back into Reno and other new US banking secrecy havens.

Further, to make other offshore banking centers unattractive, a law implemented in 2011 requires Panama-registered agents to provide client information when requested on all new incorporations, and the British Virgin Islands has adopted restrictions on due diligence. In an investors’ conference recently in San Francisco, Rothschild’s Penney stated in remarks cut from the published version of his remarks, that the US Government lacks “the resources to enforce foreign tax laws and has little appetite to do so.” ix

Now with one of the largest international offshore money facilitators, Panama’s Mossack Fonseca, admitting it is being forced to wind down, the way is clear to make the USA the new Switzerland or Panama. Drug cartels of the world are already clearly informed and a good share of the estimated $1.6 trillion of criminal funds annually are searching new safe havens in Reno and other US hot money havens. From a golden dollar to a petro dollar to now a narco dollar. It’s pretty pathetic for the country that was once the world’s leading industrial technology leader.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

http://journal-neo.org/2016/05/09/from-golden-dollar-to-petro-dollar-to-narco-dollar/

Russia Number One World Wheat Exporter
By F. William engdahl
15 June 2016

One of the comments most often heard by western mainstream economists is that Russia’s economy is too dependent on energy export and not able to be competitive in areas other than simple commodity export. While oil and gas exports remain a vital source of revenue for the State, it is far from the only one. Owing to USA and EU economic sanctions targeting the energy sector of Russia in 2014, in August 2014 the Kremlin retaliated with sanctions on a large range of EU and US food imports. Some months later in November 2015 after Turkey shot a Russian jet down over Syrian airspace, Moscow also banned major food imports from Turkey, especially tomatoes and cucumbers. The sharp reduction of food imports and select government agriculture incentives have resulted in a dramatic rise in Russian agriculture output

Before the Russian import ban, fully 40% of all Russian retail food sales were of imports. Everything from tomatoes to chickens were likely to be imports on the supermarket shelves. Multinational labels such as Nestle, Kraft, Danone were everywhere. Russians forgot their own rich food taste for the most part. Western agribusiness was well on its way to drown domestic quality food production in cheap imports. This has now dramatically changed in the short span of less than two years. Today Russian agriculture is undergoing a quiet and dramatic renaissance or new-birth in fact

President Vladimir Putin in his annual Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly on December 3, 2015 announced the national goal for Russia to become food self-sufficient within four years, by 2020 . That means replacing fully 40% of food consumption within six years. And the remarkable thing is that that goal today looks modest if anything.

After introducing food import bans against Turkey in November 2015, President Putin declared, “Russia is able to become the world’s largest supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food, which Western producers have long lost.” Russia last year also announced a complete ban on planting GMO crops or importing GMO crops from the West .

As a result of the combined import bans and measures to increase domestic food production, Russia has cut international food purchases by about 40 percent since 2013, to $26.5 billion by end of 2015 .

World Top Wheat Producer

Today the Russian Federation is one of the world’s leading agriculture exporters. The total value of exports in 2015 to some 140 countries was estimated at $20 billion, fully $5 billion more than in 2014, an increase of more than a third in one year of sanctions . That was about 25% more than arms export earnings and fully one third earnings from export of natural gas.

Many have the image of a backward, inefficient Soviet food system with giant collective farms and incentive-less producers. That model is mostly long gone. Today, fully 70% of all Russian farmland is private. The predominant form of privatization during the 1990s was distribution of lands among former state and collective farm employees. Since then most land, especially the rich black earth soil lands of South Russia near the Black Sea is officially fixed in the form of private ownership .

With some of the richest black earth soil in the world, Russia, under the right incentives, was prime to make a dramatic production rise. Russia encompasses one of only two soil belts in the world known as “Chernozem belts.” It runs from Southern Russia into Siberia across Kursk, Lipetsk, Tambov and Voronezh Oblasts. Chernozem, Russian for black soil, are black-colored soils with a high percentage of humus, phosphoric acids, phosphorus and ammonia. Chernozem is very fertile soil producing a high agricultural yield. The Russian Chernozem belt stretches from Siberia and southern Russia into northeast Ukraine, on to the Balkans along the Danube .

This past harvest year, Russia surpassed the United States to become the biggest exporter of wheat — a milestone. She also enjoyed bumper yields of corn, rice, soybeans and buckwheat. Major buyers of Russian wheat and barley include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, South Africa and South Korea.

Since the end of World War II, US agriculture exports have been regarded as a strategic sector. Today, owning to decades of heavy chemical use and intensive agribusiness methods, prime US farmland in places such as Kansas are facing serious soil depletion and death of vital micro-organisms. Harvest yield does not replace harvest quality and here organic Russian grains are emerging as the major force on world grain markets.

Russia today also permits foreign leasing of agriculture land. The government is in discussion with Asian food groups in China and Thailand to help invest and modernize key sectors such as dairy production. The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) has a $2 billion fund with China to invest in agricultural projects. They also recently formed a joint venture with Thailand’s CP Group to build Russia’s largest integrated dairy complex. It’s also working with Egypt to create an export hub for Russian grain on the Suez Canal.

Notable is the fact that many of Russia’s oligarchs, rather than take their riches out of the country to invest in London real estate or football clubs or other projects that do nothing to build Russia’s economy, are now investing big sums into Russia’s agriculture. Tax and other incentives that the Government has put in place are making agriculture investment in Russia hugely profitable for these Russians. Yevgenia Tyurikova, the head of private banking at state-run Sberbank, Russia’s largest, recently told Bloomberg, “The two hottest investments for rich Russians are farmland and European hotels. This trend is absolutely new.”

The month that Putin declared the 2020 food self-sufficiency goal in December last year, one such oligarch, Vladimir Evtushenkov, through his holding, AFK Sistema, bought the huge Yuzhny Agricultural Complex, with greenhouses the size of 2,300 football fields between the Black and Caspian seas. The plants, mainly tomatoes and cucumbers, get pure clean water from melting ice from nearby Mount Elbrus. They are grown by the millions and mostly trucked to Moscow, an 18 hour journey. Sistema spent about 9 billion rubles on agricultural expansion last year, and is now looking to buy more land to become one of Russia’s top five milk producers.

Ros Agro Plc, a sugar and meat producer, owned by billionaire Vadim Moshkovich, got 3 billion rubles ($46 million) in state support. Under the Government incentive program to encourage investment, the company paid zero tax on profits, helping to boost its net earnings margin to 33 percent, larger even than Lukoil. Other oligarchs turning in a major way to building a modern, organic and profitable agriculture sector include Phosagro OJSC fertilizer tycoon Andrey Guryev, real estate magnate Samvel Karapetyan, United Co., Rusal chief Oleg Deripaska.

The next stage in increasing the Russian food self-sufficiency is to bring an estimated 40 million hectares of idle agriculture lands, much of it abandoned during the collapse of the economy in the Yeltsin 1990’s. That’s idle land about the size of Iraq. Putin has urged the state to consider giving some of it away to create more farmers, the opposite of Stalin’s disastrous collectivization. The land give away began this month in the Far East.

The West’s too clever sanctions strategy is in fact blowing up in their faces. Russia is turning east and not west, and agriculture is a major part of that turn.



F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

I prefer the term "Un-licensed Refineries" instead of "Illegal Refineries".

Madness is when you pay a lot of money in dollars! over what you should have spent to import products you can produce yourself.

MADNESS!

License these guys, regulate them and tax their profits. Create jobs, reduce restlessness in the region.

Uncommon sense!

It is possible to replicate this model all over the country. Each state will focus on crops they have a strategic advantage in and also on crops with export potential. It is all possible. Admirable work in Anambra. Kudos people!

HungerBAD:
Cool guy.

Was he not just sued?now back to why I am here,and this question is to my Catholic friends.

So the Catholics if they want to pray to God,will have to pray through her now?with words like Mother Theresa pray for us?

Team Mountain of Fire and Miracles Church.

When you are going up a skyscraper, you can use the stairs, but do not bad mouth others who prefer to use the elevator. Do not put God in a box.

Brits say £4m per medal ’worth every penny’

British athletes made “sporting history” at Rio 2016, but their bosses believe Tokyo 2020 could be even better.

The team arrived in Brazil with the target of winning 48 medals to make Rio 2016 Britain’s best ever ‘away’ Games, but ended up with 67 medals — two more than London’s remarkable haul — and second in the medal table ahead of China.

“We’re making sporting history — 67 medals, nearly 130 medallists, across 19 sports,” said UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl.

“Even the sporting superpowers haven’t done that in the past, but we are one of those now.”

BOA chief Bill Sweeney agreed with Nicholl and praised the teamwork and “20 years of investment” that have combined to produce “this outstanding performance”.

“Since National Lottery funding started in 1997, we have had five consecutive (summer) Olympic Games of medal growth — no other country has come close to that,” said Sweeney.

It is an oft-repeated statistic that Team GB finished 36th in the medal table, with just one gold, at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

A year later, UK Sport was created for the purpose of allocating National Lottery and public funding to elite Olympic and Paralympic sport.

When super-heavyweight Joe Joyce fought for gold last night, his medal will be the 700th won by Britain in Olympics and Paralympics since lottery funding started.

Nicholl explained that 40% of the £275m (€317.5m) UK Sport gave to sports in the Olympic summer programme over the last four years is actually earmarked for Tokyo on a rolling eight-year investment plan.

Much of the Rio money went on the holding camp in Belo Horizonte — widely regarded to have been the best any team here enjoyed — and in finding solutions to Rio’s various accommodation and transport “challenges”.

Sweeney said one of Britain’s best ideas was to move some athletes — the rowers and sailors, for example — out of the athletes’ village to hotels near their venues. This clearly cost money and would be more expensive in Tokyo.

There are those, though, who have questioned the value for money — and even the ethics — of spending £4m (€4.6m) per medal.

Nicholl, however, is adamant that Britain’s success is worth every penny.

“We have all seen and felt the impact of our medal success — it can inspire the nation,” she said.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/other-sports/brits-say-4m-per-medal-worth-every-penny-417080.html

Brits say £4m per medal ’worth every penny’

British athletes made “sporting history” at Rio 2016, but their bosses believe Tokyo 2020 could be even better.

The team arrived in Brazil with the target of winning 48 medals to make Rio 2016 Britain’s best ever ‘away’ Games, but ended up with 67 medals — two more than London’s remarkable haul — and second in the medal table ahead of China.

“We’re making sporting history — 67 medals, nearly 130 medallists, across 19 sports,” said UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl.

“Even the sporting superpowers haven’t done that in the past, but we are one of those now.”


BOA chief Bill Sweeney agreed with Nicholl and praised the teamwork and “20 years of investment” that have combined to produce “this outstanding performance”.

“Since National Lottery funding started in 1997, we have had five consecutive (summer) Olympic Games of medal growth — no other country has come close to that,” said Sweeney.

It is an oft-repeated statistic that Team GB finished 36th in the medal table, with just one gold, at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

A year later, UK Sport was created for the purpose of allocating National Lottery and public funding to elite Olympic and Paralympic sport.

When super-heavyweight Joe Joyce fought for gold last night, his medal will be the 700th won by Britain in Olympics and Paralympics since lottery funding started.

Nicholl explained that 40% of the £275m (€317.5m) UK Sport gave to sports in the Olympic summer programme over the last four years is actually earmarked for Tokyo on a rolling eight-year investment plan.

Much of the Rio money went on the holding camp in Belo Horizonte — widely regarded to have been the best any team here enjoyed — and in finding solutions to Rio’s various accommodation and transport “challenges”.

Sweeney said one of Britain’s best ideas was to move some athletes — the rowers and sailors, for example — out of the athletes’ village to hotels near their venues. This clearly cost money and would be more expensive in Tokyo.

There are those, though, who have questioned the value for money — and even the ethics — of spending £4m (€4.6m) per medal.

Nicholl, however, is adamant that Britain’s success is worth every penny.

“We have all seen and felt the impact of our medal success — it can inspire the nation,” she said.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/other-sports/brits-say-4m-per-medal-worth-every-penny-417080.html

frisky2good:
The solution to our problem is micro refineries. Deregulate it completely and allow anyone that is interested to open and operate a refinery. Some big companies use up to 1 billion Naira worth of fuel every year. They will be willing to finance any micro refinery that can guarantee them fuel at a reduced rate. 10 diesel suppliers can source for funds and start a micro refinery. All those militants in the niger delta that made money from oil surveillance contracts can open micro refineries. If we are waiting for someone to open one big refinery to satisfy us all, we will still be like this in 30 years time.

You are soo on point! I do not understand our fixation with "Grand White Elephants!"

1,000 micro refineries of 20,000 barrels capacity is equivalent to A 2,000,000 barrels capacity Giant Refinery, only that the former will create more jobs. Another plus is that they all cannot be down at the same time so you have more redundancy in the system.

Simple logic.

The same mistake we are making with power. You do not need a gigantic 2000MW power plant always when you can get 200 separate 10MW micro power plants that are distributed to provide power, You decentralize your grid and reduce costs with transmission. Advantage of redundancy again. They cannot all be down at the same time.

Simple logic as always.

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