I · The Chinese model, reimagined

China does not send its most difficult people away to punish them. China sends them to villages, border regions, Africa and Pakistan — not as prisoners but as builders. Whoever builds something with which China trades strengthens the bond between China and that place. It is the most successful diplomatic export of our century, and it happens without an army.

Europe can do the same. Not in reverse — not as development aid that dumps people we no longer want to see here on another continent. But as an opportunity. Anyone who gets stuck here and is given room elsewhere to build a life, a business or a community brings back something that no Brussels subsidy could ever buy: an organic connection between continents, carried by people who know both sides from the inside.

II · What the equator needs

The equatorial biomass route requires €20bn in trade each year, ten thousand village-sized biorefineries, fifty ports that do not yet exist, and millions of people to support the logistics, chemistry, construction, services and trade. This is not work we can manage from Wageningen. It is work that must emerge and be built on the ground, by people who live and build there.

An equatorial country such as Mozambique has talented young people without jobs. Brazil has engineers without a challenge. Ghana has chemists leaving for London because there is no infrastructure at home. Europe has people with too much ambition for the European pace. Between these four groups lies an industrial revolution waiting to happen. What is missing is a passage.

III · Three groups, three opportunities

The pioneers who have already paid for their crossing

There are currently hundreds of thousands of people in Europe who have paid €20,000 to get here. That is no small amount. It is venture capital, and a willingness to take the risk. They are not passive aid seekers. They are the activists of their generation, who invested their savings and took the risk to change their fate.

And then they find themselves in a European system that cannot make use of their energy. No work permit. No recognition of qualifications. No room to start a business. The drive that brought them across boils over in an asylum procedure that takes years and in a benefit system that asks nothing of them.

Offer them an alternative path. Anyone who wishes — voluntarily, with support and start-up capital — can put their entrepreneurial spirit to work where it matters: a biorefinery in Ghana, a Juncao cooperative in Mozambique, a trading house in Suriname supplying Rotterdam. Not as a return. As advancement. With European recognition, European partners and access to the European market. The €20,000 they invested will pay off on a continent where they are actually allowed to build.

The Europeans who find things too cramped here

There are also Europeans who are stuck here. Not because they were born elsewhere, but because of their temperament. The entrepreneur who loses six months in every consultation committee. The engineer who cannot get their idea past the regulations. The activist who makes videos about what ought to happen but cannot find a place where they can make it happen themselves. The same applies to them: drive seeks ground.

The equator offers ground. Literally: marginal land that does not exist in Europe. Figuratively: terrain without entrenched interests, without three hundred years of regulation, without a meeting culture that consumes half of every day. Those who are suffocating here can breathe there.

Organisations with vision and networks

Greenpeace is an organisation that has shown in its communications for decades what it wants to see realised: a world where energy is green, where industry respects nature, where the Global South is not exploited. Its videos are clear, its rhetoric powerful, its networks global.

This is a respectful invitation. The equatorial biomass route is precisely what Greenpeace has advocated for years, translated into industrial form: solar energy where it falls, crops that bind more carbon than they emit, partnership instead of exploitation, no fossil fuels, no nuclear fission. What has stood in campaigns for decades can now be put into concrete and plantations. Greenpeace has the global presence, the trust of equatorial governments, the credibility among the European public and the organisational capacity to set this up. No other organisation has that combination. The invitation is clear and respectful: come and build this. Or organisations with the same vision and weight — WWF, 350.org, Fridays for Future if they are old enough to handle coordination — that wish to take up the call.

IV · What this is not

This is not a plan to dump those who are not welcome here somewhere else. That would repeat what the United Kingdom tried with Rwanda: offloading its shame onto another country. It does not work, and it does not deserve to work.

This is something else. It is recognition that the people with the most drive — whether they were born in Aleppo or Amsterdam — cannot find a suitable space in present-day Europe. Their energy gets stuck in procedures, meetings and regulations, and in an expectation of adaptation that breaks precisely the best among them. A continent that cannot accommodate its most energetic people grows poorer. A continent that sends them out into the world to build something with which their countries of origin subsequently trade enriches itself twice over.

And it is voluntary. Those who want to stay can stay. Those who want to build where building is permitted are given the path. No banishment. No punishment. An opportunity.

V · What it gives us here

A Europe that eases its pressure points. Less tension in neighbourhoods where too many people with too much energy have too little prospect. Less radicalisation, because radicalisation is primarily a consequence of meaninglessness, not ideology. Fewer asylum procedures that take years, because a second path — entrepreneurial, productive and supported by Europe — offers an exit that the current system does not provide.

And a Europe with trading partners at the equator led by people who understand us — who speak our language, know our rules and can read our markets. Not ambassadors who change every four years. People who have built their lives there, and who are precisely for that reason the most natural bridge.