By Yoichi Shimatsu 
and Cattleman Kevin Tournes
3-17-26

Intro to the Beef Wars series (Part 2) - Following Ohio-based rancher Kevin Tournes’ insights into Brazil’s mega-corporate expansion of global beef sales with its role in the now cartel-dominated U.S. cattle market, this second essay is penned by “old China hand”  Yoichi Shimatsu recalls his past role in the development in China’s early phase of introducing beef herds across the arid Gobi Desert and also examines the more recent trend there of importation of carcasses from South America that have recently spurred an official investigation into misconduct in the beer trade by Brazil. Here the key Brazilian role in triggering the global Coronavirus pandemic is examined with a critical focus.

Recent and as-yet inexplicable events - most puzzling being a Chinese high-court case against Brazilian beef exports - is indicative of the Amazon basin cattle industry’s heinous abuses that triggered the worldwide COVID (coronavirus) contagian. During the early phase of the pandemic United Nations bureaucrats falsely blamed the outbreak on the Chinese riverside city of Wuhan - an obvious ploy to evade exposure of the actual source of a  pandemic that killed thousands of victims worldwide and shutdown major economies for two years. The Center Disease Control (CDC) and other controlled medical organizations joined that chorus of blame without critical examination of the evidence - nor any mention of the French-sponsored international military games, which were at center of exposure to the initial virus infestation,

Here, the author shows how the coronavirus contagion actually began in Brazil’s Amazon region due to massive deforestation aimed at expanding grassy pastures to feed an expanding national herd of beef cattle. Nowhere else on Earth hosts clusters of 50+ variants of the Coronavirus, which infected Brazilian owned meat-packing plants - their workers falling ill and quietly dying under a high-level cover-up - that was partially exposed by a U,S. Senate investigation - which the compromised mainstream New York news outlets did not report to the American public. So how did blame for the pandemic get put on Wuhan, China, the supposed outbreak center? The atheletes at the French-sponsored International Military Games, then being held in Wuhan, were exposed to COVID by dining at a banquet of roast Brazilian beef - the untold suppressed original source of the global pandemic.

This investigative journalist is never one to engage in sensationalist gossip but is a classical scribe charting the fate of modern empires. During the COVID pandemic my essays expressed skeptism toward the claim by the World Health Organization (WHO) that a solo bat flying from China’s far-southern tropical region of Yunnan on a thousand mile course to the Yangtze river valley in the country’s temperate center managed to infect a meat vendor’s shop in a huge food mall in Wuhan. That patently ridiculous conjecture showed the desperation of the UN bureaucrats protecting their secret payoffs from the ultra-corrupt Brazilian kleptocracy. By contrast this journalist has spent years as an agrarian consultant throughout China’s remote interior and, indeed, helped establish the first foreign-led environmental advisory team to improve basic standards for agriculture and livestock in the “boondocks” and across the Gobi and Taklamakhan desert regions. Beef cattle was our main focus in arid regions - of the Gobi and Takhlaman deserts - where indigenous bats feed on cacti, fruit and insects - not on mammal flesh.

Wuhan along the vast Yangtze River is a crowded industrial city with a strict sanitary code that prevent insect blooms of the sort that attracts bats. The mythical bat story was concocted by British-trained (and led) medical researchers based in Hong Kong, when a lot of Brits then had a pathological resentment of the so-called Handover of that island’s governance from the British Empire to the People’s Republic of China. Despite their fears “nothing really changed” was my observation as the first foreign professor at the island’s top university - a stint that included a lot of medical reporting and also a scandal of different type of bat - a mystery bat-shaped plane involved in bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on a dark night. My research into NATO records turned up clear evidence that Bill Clinton himself in violation of international law ordered the hit-job that killed a young Chinese couple doing social journalism in the Yugoslav war zone. What’s so sinister about the free-spirited innocent bat? Why does the comic-book character Batman never disclose his actual identity? Because to get justice done he has to break the law. The same goes for the UN bureacracy, a bunch of law-breakers but out to fill their own pockets. So now let’s go - to put it in British slang - bat-shyte!

An indigestable fact remains: the Coronavirus pandemic did not originate from bat dung but arrived in boxes of Brazilian beef shipped to the French-sponsored World Military Games held in the Yangtze river city of Wuhan. Clearly and indisputably, the source of the global Coronavirus pandemic was tainted Brazilian beef out of the ecologically devastated Amazon basin swarming with the world’s greatest cluster of COVID micro-pathogens - more than 50 subtypes in all. The details are discused in this extensive essay and then followed by a more amusing account of the serendipidal adventures of my organic agriculture advisory team in China’s rural interior in and around the Gobi Desert - then focused on cattle rearing.

Brazil’s Blame Game against China

Before exploring China’s still-expanding beef industry on its homeland ranges and at a new beef packing facility in Colorado, some attention should first be given to the Brazilian cattle industry’s secretive, sloppy and sinister role in triggering and spreading the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, which shut down American society for two years and killed a vast number of its people worldwide. They got away with it back then - but not forever. Here it’s argued that the World Health Organization’s (WHO) campaign to assign blame on a tropical bat from Yunnan in China’s tropical south was a tactical ploy to cover over bureaucrat insider collusion in global beef shipments. The bat’s jungle habitat was a vast distance and far different than the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.  The phantom Yunnan bat held responsible by devious medical researches was never once spotted by boat captains or tourists along that riverine passage - the exotic bat was a phantom from a desperate imagination.

The UN bureaucrats’ lies were key to an official cover-up to protect its UN sister group the WTO (World Trade Organization) to evade global condemnation for pushing questionable disease-prone meat exports from tropical regions of Latin America - specifically from Brazil’s Amazon Basin - into major markets in the industrial North, including the USA, Europe, China and Korea/Japan. The false assignation of COVID was to a low-cost food stall - which had zero contact with disease research at the much abused and falsely accused Wuhan medical-research lab. The blame was cast on China and not the more plausible culprit - Brazil - with its burgeoning and sloppy beef cattle sector, which was actively involved in destroying the Amazon basin’s ecological balance by chopping down and torching vast swathes of tropical forests to be replaced with grassy fields for beef cattle.

The absurdly false narrative was rigged up to protect the greed and chicanery of United Nation’s officials in bed with globalist bankers, politicians and major corporate funds allied with Latin American mega-corporations in the globalized food trade. Shipping beef from the poorest regions of Brazil to the world’s wealthiest industrial nations enabled the middle-men with investment funds, shipping connections and market access was a no-brainer way to make super-profits Even before the coronavirus outbreaks spread worldwide, the bureaucrats and bankers protected themselves from public denunciation for food-related pandemics by ordering the removal of all “country of origin” labels and related information from shipping boxes of beef and carcasses out of slaughterhouses who knows where. The food cartel realized that a food-based pandemic could be fatal for elitist global financial networks. It’s high time to bring those crooks to justice for their heinous lying role and cover-up of mass poisoning with Coronavirus-tainted substandard beef from an environmentally devasted Amazon tropical river basin, where more than 50 different strains of Coronavirus flourish - and are released during ecological disasters.

At the time of the outbreak the major Brazilian meat packers were shipping diseased cattle carcasses and boxed meat of uncertain food safety to some 60 nations worldwide, including all the regions impacted by COVID - starting with China and the USA. Through infection of the athletic participants at the French-sponsored world military games (sports contests between soldiers of 50-plus nations) in Wuhan, human-transmitted COVID sprang up at astounding speed around the globe. In the USA, the pandemic began with the arrival to southern New Mexico of a French officer from the Wuhan military games to meet his daughter. A reunion banquest for 24 local guests was held at a winery owned by a French settler family. Within two weeks all participants came down with an strange “lung infection” while the French officer toured the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base and probably also the White Sands missile range. All the arrows point back to delicious and plentiful Brazilian beef eaten by international military atheletes at the Wuhan games - that is why and how COVID spread worldwide so quickly to distant nations. The UN agencies need to be taken apart brick-by-brick to get to the bottom of the Coronavirus cover-up and guilty officials jailed for collusion in spreading mass murder. As for the Brazilian government’s involvement that is a matter for the World Court or a joint military tribunal of infected nations. The only rule should be: No Quarter given or received.

Tropical forest destruction for cattle rearing spread Coronavirus

Over the past four decades, massive expansion of cattle-raising for beef production by Brazil’s mega-corporations has penetrated into the lush Amazon river basin. Vast swathes of tropical forest have been razed to make way for tall grass - as basic fodder for steers - often illegally without government approval and consequent environmental collapse. The complex web of jungle life has largedly been eliminated and replaced with a monoculture of feed-stock. These are all a well-documented facts charted by international environmental experts. So what is the connection between tropical deforestation and the global COVID pandemic?

The Amazon rain-forest has provided habitat for more than 50 distinct strains of Coronavirus - which largely remain dormant under the lush wet jungle canopy. Whenever threaten by large-scale disasters - wildfires, sustained drought or clear-cut timber felling - the varietals of coronavirus break-out to swarm through tropical foliage to infect mammalian species, the lungs of humans included. In its “emergency mode”  fast-and-furious reproduction increases their chances of survival of virus strains in a now hostile environment. Wild animals are affected resulting in kill-offs - and same fate also applies to human carriers.

Destruction of millions of hectares of Amazon forests had an effect much like a nuclear bomb - triggering an ever-widening swath of extinction followed by massive Coronavirus releases on the human population along with surviving animals and plants along the channels of the Amazon River. The increased frequency of jungle COVID outbreaks rapidly spread onto grazing cattle and other mammals - including the local human population. A massive viral bloom from tainted beef is what powered the rapid worldwide spread of Coronavirus to more than 50 nations via an ideal carrier - exported frozen Brazilian meat. The world’s military athletes at the Wuhan military games were obviously not bitten by a raging bat but were infected at banquets where inexpensive imported Brazilian beef was served as the main course - unbeknownst to French military officers and the Chinese hosts, The Brazilian beef industry was and remains guilty of mass murder by negligence, abject silence and unsustainable destruction of the Amazon forests. Step aside you UN globalists and bosses of Wall Street investment firms or get roped around your necks with a noose for unforgivable crimes against humanity!

You can tell from the lingo that I was a fan of westerns - aka cowboy movie shootouts - as a growing boy. There are times when a six-shooter renders justice better than a rigged court of “law”. Since then the U.S. Senate launched an investigation at a Brazilian meat-packing plant (in an undisclosed U.S. state) - where more than 200 meatpackers were found to be infected with COVID and six workers died with the symptoms - without a single report sent to the USDA. The cattle carcasses the unlucky crew were butchering originated in Brazil. Similar shipments of tainted Brazilian beef worldwide accounts for the near-simulataneous Coronavirus outbreaks in more than 50 importing nations.

Wuhan on the Yangtze River happened to be a center of beef soup consumption by upstream descendants of ancient Muslim communities and is also especially popular among college students, who in contrast to their parents harbor no traditional Buddhist biases toward red meat. The infamous “Yunnan bat” theory of COVID origin - promoted by the UN and rejected by Chinese scientists - can now be comprehended as a ploy by the World Trade Organization (WTO) whose bosses are implicated by monetary kickbacks and perks from the Brazilian government and its export beef sector. Early on in that pandemic while I was still in China, I penned articles that showed the absurd improbablility of a tropical bat from Yunnan the far south flying over a series of river basins to drop COVID-infected dung over and onto a sheet-steel roof-covered market in Wuhan near the Yangtse river basin. Bomb’s Away! WHO’s got to be kidding! During my rest periods in Chiangmai, Thailand, following health-crushing research inside the Fukushima nuclear zone, my third-floor balcony was swarming with bats searching for wild figs. Those critters would fling fresh wet dung at this guy peering at there voracious fruit-eating a few feet from by fourth-storey balcony. Advice: Never be holding a glass of wine or mug of beer outdoors when bats are cruising!

My essays at the time of pandemic showed that COVID was first carried to the American Southwest - by a Parisian military officer returned from the French-sponsored military games in Wuhan - the human trigger for the initial COVID outbreak across the USA. That French officer had flown to Los Angeles and then arrived by rental car to a local winery in south-central New Mexico to meet up with his daughter who was a college student in the Southwest region. Invited as his guests were eight local couples - the best ballroom dancers at the winery’s weekend concerts - all of whom came down with the first COVID infections in the USA (that contagious disease was still unknown to medical science) - all sickened within the following week of the wine reception. The French officer then toured the vast Fort Bliss U.S. Army base, where many of its athelete soldiers were returning from the Wuhan games. Bliss was clobbered by a subsequent COVID outbreak among the troops as the virus spread into the civilian population.

With those facts on the ground, the next bit of evidence was the suspiciously rapid “spread” of coronavisus to dozens of nations worldwide, obviously from infected soldier-sportsmen at the Brazil-sourced beef banquets in Wuhan. Four nations that did not participate in the Wuhan world military games were: Israel, Britain, Australia and Japan, where the outbreaks occurred months after other nations whose soldiers participated in those games. Of course, the bad news was shocking for the host officers with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), who were soon doubly blind-sided by heavily publicized outbreak in the Wuhan fish-and-game market stall - in the CDC blame-game in collusion with the UN bureaucracy.

China’s continuing probe by now has linked COVID at the Wuhan military games to Brazilian beef imports. All I can say to right the wrongs is for the UN bureauracracy - especially the World Trade Organization - to be turned inside-out to get to the facts and the truth about the Brazilian role in the global COVID pandemic. After an intensive probe those corrupted UN groups should be disbanded. From now on, all boxes of imported meat must be forced to carry an accurate country of origin certificate attached to the shipping box and on labels at supermarkets. Plus lab testing must be done before foreign beef is put on supermarket chillers. Mass poisoning must never happen again - and the culpits - the crooks of Brazil in high office - should be sacked and put before a world tribunal - with dire consequences.

Chinese takeover of U.S. meat packers

On the other side of the coins - the yuan and dollar - the Chinese juggernaut of corporate profits and Beijing government-backed finance took a huge bite out of American pork production with the takeover of Smithfield, a major supplier of bacon and ham. At the time of takeover more than a decade ago - a major wake-up call about foreign targeting of the U.S. food sector - has been followed nothing in the way of federal counter-action in defense of American hog raisers. Given the silent consent from federal and state officials, the Chinese takeover spree has since expanded across the ag belt, most alarmingly in the state of Nebraska of a huge beef cattle slaughterhous and packing plant and its adjoining facilities. Ruthless expansionism does have its impact on product - as known to anyone who has ever compared foreign-run Smithfield bacon with genuine American product. Due to the cost of feed Smithfield product is excessively fatty and lacking the meaty crispy crunch of its rival 100-percent American brands in, say, a BLT. It’s basically in the bottom-tier category of junk food - a crappy way to start your day.

(Note: Starting my work experience at age 5 doing farmwork in the Indio desert region and later toiling at an Indiana hog operation where piglets were belly-injected with antibiotics, catching and hauling brutalized chickens for Campbell’s soup, inspecting rotted tomatoes on the Del Monte catsup production line, and overseeing farms of absentee growers, I’ve been especially tuned to the quality of food production and especially leery of delinquent corporate cheaters since tainted or corrupted foodstuffs are tantamount to mass murder of their paying customers.)

There were troubling signs across the “Cornhusker State” where long-established farm families raised concerns about the lack of a thorough review of the pros-and-cons of a Chinese takeover of a huge hunk of meat production in Nebraska. The hard questions were never raised or addressed by the governor and his bureaucrats eager to please foreign interests lining their pockets and expanding their land-holdings while ignoring the legitimate concerns of local farmers and ranchers - many of them descended from pioneering families of “sod busters” on the prairie. It’s not just the economics of ag that are being threatened but also the essential heritage of rural tradition and local customs. Don’t expect billion-yuan Chinese corporations cozy with the CCP (Communist Party of China)  to be celebrating Christmas or Easter when cold-cash is their sole concern - along with running the U.S. economy into the ground as yesteryear’s once world-leading food producer.

Foreign Experts at Gobi Desert Discoveries

On a lighter note, my madcap adventures with a small team of foreign agricultural expert are recalled here in regard to this discussion of China’s emerging beef industry, which of course entails cattle rearing. How this writer got involved had much to due with my childhood and early life. First, my background in ag began at age 5 as a summertime egg inspector and strawberry picker in California’s Imperial dunes region following an overflow of the Colorado River. During the rest of the year I did all sorts of veg tending, fruit picking and chicken feeding for my grandparents in Los Angeles. From there things went downhill after entering Purdue University’s biochem program, which ended with the gunshot murder of my main professor who was the top-ranked adviser to Eli Lilly, during the start-up phase of the drug-induced mind-control program aka MK-ULTRA. Although the youngest-ever biochem professor in the world and a successful inventor, his name never appeared again in print or the academic record.

Leaving the program with seven other skeptical students meant loss of my scholarship, which put me back into the only available source of income - grunt farmwork - for instance grabbing chickens by their legs at midnight runs for Campbell’s soup and weighing truckloads of tomatoes for Del Monte ketchup/catsup. Parttime-jobs including my being the only worker at a massive feed-lot housing 3,000 hogs, doing the feeding by shoveling grain from the back of a moving truck and cleaning up tons of excrement. A nicer type of part-time employment was shoveling horse manure out of stables. Eventually somewhat more gentile tasks, besides blacksmithing, involved me in the first-ever farm-to table-project at a cafeteria sponsored by the Anglican Church to provide meals to low-income students and working youths - a lot of those foodstuffs grown on my small backwoods farm. A bright kid from California introduced wrapping corn tortilla around pieces of grilled chicken - which was a culinary revolution for Hoosiers.

The need to buy a better vehicle for long-distance travel than my small 1930s Ford truck forced me to work as a welder at a local gas-furnace producer and then the big move to Gary, Indiana, and then Southside Chicago to work as a millwright at Republic and US Steel, during the brief period when they were churning out steel tubes and plate for the Alaska Pipeline then just starting construction. Up the ladder meant going from farm laborer to steelworker - with house painter in between - and onto New York’s art scene and at last journalism for a Wall Street magazine. Knowing something about everthing aided my advancement up the press ladder.

Thus, could I be a competent ag advisor when China was just opening up to the West? Even with a blindfold on, I could  inject a syringe of flu-prevention medicine into a pig’s rear end. That knowhow was way better than a lot of unproven or tentative theory. So the routine of teaching journalism was driving me nuts in super-urban Hong Kong following my editorial stint at the Japan Times in Tokyo. The country boy in me wanted out of the big cities and urban hellholes lacking fresh air and missing the comforting chaos of real life. So I signed up with the only ecology program in my reach in super-urban Hong Kong - which involved inspecting organic farms for compliance and also doing some exotic research in the distant jungles of Yunnan in southern China.

The Saint Paul of Sino-Pacific origin

My Vancouver-raised colleague Paul Chan and I were making early-morning unannounced and secretive inspections of the island’s top-rated veg farm - an hour before sunrise when several workers with tanks stapped on their backs were spraying cabbages. The acrid scent was from a notorious agro-chemical. That finding sent a shockwave through the do-gooder health-freak community and a big fine for the farm operators. Instead of being thanked for catching award-winning cheaters, we were treated as traitors of eco-agriculture and basically ostracized. Well, I never got a payoff from the crooks so I didn’t fret over being ostracized. To be rid of us, we were sent on a special mission to Yunnan Province, a tropical region in the far south of China, the center for flower growning and new coffee plantations. There, the science advisor to our program had made shocking discoveries of chemical contamination including arsenic along the Mekong River and its banks. He was able to trace back the heavy-metal contaminants to the foot of Mount Everest, where eons of mountain uplift under geo-pressures of the northward push of the Indian Subcontinent, was unloosing minerals from near the Earth’s core. The implications were staggering, for instance the threat to drinking water in poor and populous Bangladesh, spillover into the Bay of Bengal and lethal contamination of coffee beans destined for Starbuck’s Asian franchise including the China realm.

When our fact-based report on the grim findings was suppressed, Paul and I decided to start-up our own eco-project inside Mainland China and submitted a proposal to its consulate in Hong Kong. The approval was quickly done over tea with a mid-ranking official who said we were the only foreigners to request involvement in agricultural development (other than short-visit farm delegations from overseas) and accepted us in an advisory role to our surprise. We were in like Flynn - onto virgin soil that’s been plowed for thousands of years. I was thrilled since on my visits to the Beijing region I had seen farmers on ox-carts - this was to be a journey into the past and a hike toward the future. In a wider perspective, the start-up ag program was a minor affair, since I had just completed a news reporting stint in the Pakistan-Afghan region before and immediately after the 911 affair. That was followed by an appointment to teach journalist at Tsinghua University in Beijing, The ag program would fit into my annual schedule of school vacation periods. There’s one other link that is to my maternal grandfather, who was a Japanese ag advisor in the Shantung Peninsula prior to the Japanese invasion. Much of his efforts was in the cattle-rearing region in that province’s hilly interior. Both my grandfathers were enthusiastic about farming and gardening, and I couldn’t resist following in their footsteps.

So my first visit to distant rural regions was plotted out by one of my journalism students at a top university in Beijing. An  Uygur Muslim from the far-western province of Gansu, he was planning to visit his folks and asked if I was interested in seeing the remote desert landscape. After the last hour of class before the spring break we boarded a train heading deep into the country’s interior, which required of us a lot of standing to allow seating for women. The slow train took three days to arrive at the terminus - at midnight 0 when every tea room and guest house was shuttered. We board a van packed to the ceiling with workers returning home. The driver dropped us off at the edge of a desert and told us to walk until sunrise.

A lone house was lit at 2 a.m. Hasan knocked on the door, which opened to reveal a old Uyghur man who invited us in out of the cold and heated some wheat lumps for us and cups of dark brown tea. He told us to keep hiking steadily without stopping in order to spot the next town at early sunrise. The advice was spot on. After trudging across the sand without saying a word, we both shouted at the sight of tin roofs in the light of dawn. As luck had it, a lone cook was slicing parts of beef - livers, tendons, intestines and scraps off a bone - for noodle soup - which was delicious and warmed my chilled bones. The chef, one of the Agha Khan’s followers of the Ishmaili sect of Islam, pointed out directions to a truck park where we could hitch a ride to towns in the desert interior.

Along the sunny path we passed ornate mosques and a fountain where women were scrubbing clothes. A streetside orator caught our attention with his harangue against the American invasion of Afghanistan - as he appealed for muslim unity against the madman Bush. That was a wake-up call, for a Yank like me. Good God, what have we gotten ourselves into?  Hasan found a driver heading for his home town, so we tossed up the backpacks and sat on either corner for an open-air tour of the Wild West. After several hours along a bumpy dirt trail, the road flattened out with asphalt, thanks to the labor of hundreds of Chinese men with shovels and wheelbarrels. The truck dumped us onto the rural town of Linxia in front of a Tibetan curio shop. I jumped down and was stunned to see a young Tibetan schoolteacher I had met earlier in Beijing - a one in a billion miracle. “How’s this possible, Jingme?” His reply was: All trucks and buses stop here to let off or pick up passengers - which is why my father has a curio shop here.

After tea at his home, a courtesy visit to the local party office to inform them we were not terrorists and a visit to a teahouse owned by a widow, I spent a couple of days at the Tibetan family’s home where we discussed all sorts of current issues including my distaste for “that old fossil idolized by idiot westerners and his following at the CIA”, an opinion based on my visits to northern India and Nepal. I have zero tolerance for religious fraudsters and medical quacks. Jingme’s dad was skeptical of my opinion he being an all-too devout Buddhist practitioner.

That short visit was soon followed up with a two-week sojourn in the yak region. On arrival to the same town, Paul and I were rushed to a meeting of county officials. The tension on the dusty streets was palpable following several fistfights between Tibetan herdsmen and Muslim truckers hauling yaks to packing facilities for the all-important beef-noodle soup, which is sold from the Tianshan mountains to Beijing and beyond. The drivers were threatening to “ride shotgun” against violent herders. I could see despair in the eyes of officials fearing total collapse of ag production across the highlands. They asked if we had any recommendations. So with Paul translating, I stood up - as tall as possible in imitation of Gary Cooper or Clint Eastwood - a cowboy from the Far East and kid from the West.

A Brutal Range War

”Gentlemen,” I said while thinking quickly, “it’s a pleasure to be here to wrangle with a common problem in the West of China as in the western USA: How can we reach fair settlement of cattle sales between ranchers and the meat industry? Back in America’s wild west, different languages and customs of settlers from all parts of the world was a barrier to communication and misunderstanding led to gunfights, especially between beef cowboys and sheep herders over grazing rights. I see something like that happening here in the Tibetan highlands. The answer is the same in the East and West: To deal with illiteracy the banks need to set up personal ID codes for Tibetans, who like the American Indians have names often unrecognizable to settlers of European ancestry. I admit having great difficulty trying to follow the curly script of Tibetan - it’s impossible for me to decipher and probably for your bankers as well. Therefore the simple solution is to issue a unique one-letter code for each Tibetan family’s bank account. Adding simple numbers to the letter code enables their adult kin to have an associate account. From now on whenever a Tibetan herder and a Muslim driver complete a deal, each should get confirmation on a slip of paper from the bank verifying date, price and personal authorization with the signature of the Muslim and code word of the Tibetan. That’s all it takes.”

The sigh of relief were audible and suddenly the glum ag officials were sounding boisterous. Paul asked: “Where did you learn such shyte?” My reply: In Indiana, of course, the most rural state in the Union where even the jokes are corny. By the following spring-summer transition Tibetan herder families were able with their fair share of income to purchase small tractors for work and family outings, including shopping at department stores. They still wore colorful robes of their mountain culture, but in many ways life on the range had dramatically improved. That was an indicator of our project’s success.

On next venture - an early summer tour - Paul and I were focused on the yak milk sector with interest in a new line of single-serving boxed drink. The rich-tasting milk - more like cream - contained a huge kick of vitamins and minerals as compared with cow milk and, as local lore had it, accounted for the longevity of aged Tibetans. Paul handled market orders from Hong Kong and Singapore, whereas my focus was on the competing schools of grass-growing between the Chinese researchers of Tibetan Plateau vegetation and the George Bush Senior foundation sponsored a mono-culture hay project nearby. A fairly young herb researcher disclosed to us nearly 200 varietals of grasses and shrubs existed on the Tibetan Plateau, several with medical curative properties. Even a toxic vetch was consumed by yaks to eliminate parasitic worms from their digestive tracts and livers.

Our test handouts to Hong Kong senior centers of boxed yak milk were showing good results. We were on a roll. With their earnings by the following spring, the yak herder families were able to purchase mini-tractors that pulled wagons enabling easier purchases of hay bails and also great for family shopping excusions. The countless eons of slavery were at last over and done with. Then disastrous sabotage stuck - with sacrilegious abuse of the Buddha’s name by immature idiotic fanatics.

In late summer, our eco-partnership invited Eric Meili of Switzerland’s cattle-rearing institute to give seminars reaching herdsmen and milk-industry staffers with Paul translating. On our arrival to the same dairy region, I could sense tension in the air with the lack of friendly smiles and townspeople absent from the alleyways. I noticed individuals with black scarves wrapped around their heads, obviously scouting us out. The dairy officials did not seem concerned, but I had a nagging feeling that big trouble in little Tibet was on the near horizon.

A week later when we were touring the lower foothills of distant Pingliang news arrived by phone that young Tibetan radical “priests” had smashed the windows of a hotel owned by a Tibetan exile from New York, sending her fleeing back to the USA. Her liquor chest was broken into and drunken monks were zonked on the floors urinating. Next the radical mob in saffron robes marched to the yak dairy and torched it with molotovs. With pistols in hand the “priests” threatened the herders and shot a few of their yaks. I asked whether law enforcement was called in. The cops arrived too late enabling the activist monks to flee back in the direction of Dharamsala, India, with their stolen money and loot. A phone call to my local buddy disclosed that his father in total depression locked his shop and refused to ever visit the temple again. My father admitted that he had been a fool and that you were right to inform him of the fraudulent situatiion. Oh, well, I muttered to myself, better late than never, I guess.. Their family soon thereafter relocated to Lhasa to open a hotel for foreign tourists. Awakening to reality is a part of the progress to enlightenment, however difficult it’s to bear.

Apple Country

Pingliang - translating as apple grove - is a fruit-growing region in the sand hills opposite the Tibetan Plateau. Eric was shocked by the low-level of animal husbandry with local families keeping a couple of cows in the back of their hovel homes much like dogs - and fed with merely a handful of grass each day. To shake off a headache from huge swings in air pressure on our cross-province journey, our trio strolled up a sandhill and while nearing its summit, we exulted at the vast field of green grass which thrived amid the lower clouds. That pastoral scene basically wrote the script for his speech to local ag officials set for the following morning. There is indeed sufficient grazing areas for expansion of cattle rearing, but it requires tending, some fencing and herding of many heads of cattle to save on the cost of manpower - for instance by hiring teenagers at vacation time to keep watch on the combined herd.

It was a pleasant visit ruined by frantic phone calls from the Tibetan region reporting the arsons to us. Over post-dinner beer, Eric mentioned “What happened up there is much like the wars of religion across medieval Europe.” My wise Asian reposte went: Time is how you look at it. Maybe in day or a year, each of the warring parties will wake up to realize how idiotic they were - that happened after your wars of religion, eh?

Trout Fishing under the Himalayas

After accompanying the Swiss expert by train to Hong Kong, for a night of innocent carousing with some local ladies, the annual beef operation was over and rated a success imparting a vast amount of animal husbandry experiences and tips from Eric to his Chinese counterparts. But our work was not done. Paul and I had to take a long train ride to Dunhuang, the ancient center of Buddhist art and music along the Silk Road. Our next task was to advise a huge trout aquaculture venture fed by the last cold streams off  the Himalayan plateau onto the harshest desert region of Asia. The agro-business venture was facing two huge problems - the doubling of trucking fees to Hong Kong and disappearing fish stock. After Paul did a lot of calculating, he arrived as a solution: “If we can’t afford to send fish to Hong Kong, then we’d better entice eco-tourists from Hong Kong to vacation here.” The buildings - designed after ancient China’s palaces - were exotic enough to impress yuppies living in sky-high tiny apartments.

As for disappearing fish, I lingered around the channels where trout feeding occurred. Following the water courses to a turning point my curiosity focused on bent wire-fencing hidden by shrubs. On another day I noticed young men loitering around their unofficial secret entrance. I pulled up the fence and waved to them to enter to join my swimming contest. If any of them could swim faster than me along one of the fast-moving water channels, I promised to give them the equivalent of $10 if they could beat me a swimming. Since I grew up with yakuza thugs in Kobe and black ganglanders in LA, I had command of the patois - lowlife lingo - even in battered Chinese to entice a punk. I called over a younger fish worker to wave a flag for the race. The young ganglanders were overjoyed. Their big brother - obviously the boss - cheated by stepping ahead. I easily beat them by diving into the slowest moving channel. Then I rudely and roughly demanded they pay me the equivalent of three dollars. The bad boys were shocked. “If you don’t I’m going to report you to the police about how you steal fish!” One of the young fellows started to cry: My mom will be so angry, please sir, let me go home.

After sending away the younger ones, I told the gang leader: “Tomorrow morning you be sure to come here at 5 a.m. because I will have two horses ready for us to ride into the Takhlamakan Desert. I’ll bet you right now only one of us will return.” Though widely considered a tough fellow, he was scared shirtless. Indeed I was seriously considering leaving him on distant sand dunes while I rode away with his horse and saddle. So Sayonara! and soon I’d be singing “Happy Trails” like Gene Autry.  “And if you don’t show up for the ride I’ll report your thievery to the provincial police. Either way I’ll still be here to watch you hang!” On the following morning, everyone in the county had heard that he fled at midnight, never to be seen again. As put in the old cowboy movies: “String him up!” Thus, my hard younger years in the Indio-Imperial region of California’s southeastern desert - and there learning to shoot rifles at age 6 - had trained me to survive under hellish conditions and be something of a rowdy in the tradition of our tough Okie neighbors - (Oklahoma refugees from the 1930’s Dust Bowl as recalled in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”).

End of the Silk Road

But then another disaster - totally unnatural - stuck hard: the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns. That mega-disaster put an end to my China beef adventures and focused my attention on charting and surviving massive doses of radioactivity while countering the lies and deceptions of the Tokyo Electric Company juggernaught. My initial efforts to help Japanese farmers and horse-raisers decontaminate that region proved futile due to government orders for mass evacuations of the rural villages. The sole consolation were the roots of progress that our trio had planted over a decade, which resulted in a flourishing new agriculture movement in the dryest arid zone of the Asian Continen - among tribal peoples and dirt-poor settlers alike - who got their first exposure to the American Way of sod-busting and working on the land with livestock. That was the final chapter of the Wild West adventure.

On returning to the vast trout hatchery from distant ag regions, I’d be sure to buy a large leg of desert sheep for the fish crew, who would place a lean-to of branches from desert shrubs for the outdoors roast. We’d joke over cans of beer in anticipation of a feast of fragrant nuggets of fire-roasted meat and then as the flames turned to glowing coals stare into the pyre with thoughts of camel caravans along the ancient Silk Road and the wayward traveler known as Marco Polo - the present and distant past joined into a single vision under starlight.