Word: africas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Officially, China is a champion of black-African interests. The government has denounced South Africa's policy of apartheid and devoted the lion's share of its scanty foreign aid to assisting 45 friendly African states. Beijing also gives scholarships to 1,600 black students each year to study at Chinese universities. Unofficially, though, many Chinese consider blacks racially inferior and question their government's aid to Africa when citizens at home are tightening their belts...
When Glantz's forecasting technique is applied to the rest of the world, two things become clear. One is that virtually every long-term environmental change is occurring in miniature somewhere on the planet, whether it is a regional warming trend in sub-Saharan Africa or the vanishing coastline in Louisiana. The other is that Homo sapiens is an immensely resourceful species, with an impressive ability to accommodate sweeping change. In countries and regions hit by climatic upheavals, people have come up with a variety of solutions that are likely to have broad applicability to the global problems of tomorrow...
...problems of agriculture are likely to be critical in the next century, as growing populations, deteriorating soil conditions and changing climates put even more pressure on a badly strained food-supply system. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, that system has broken down periodically over the past 20 years, resulting in the familiar TV images of children with swollen bellies and relief camps filled with hungry people...
What is not so well known is that hundreds of grass-roots organizations in Africa are taking action to cope with environmental change. Somalia has launched a vigorous antidesertification drive that includes a ban on cutting firewood. In Burkina Faso villagers have responded to steadily dwindling rainfall by building handmade dams and adapting primitive water-gathering techniques. Even so simple a trick as putting stones along the contour lines of a field to catch rainwater can make the difference between an adequate harvest and no harvest...
...export of environmentally dangerous waste, especially to countries without the proven technology to dispose of it safely. In the past two years, some 3 million tons of hazardous waste have been transported from the U.S. and Western Europe on ships like the Pelicano to countries in Africa and Eastern Europe. Observed Saad M. Baba, third secretary in the Nigerian mission to the U.N.: "International dumping is the equivalent of declaring war on the people of a country." And if such wastes continue to proliferate, man will have all but declared war on the earth's environment -- and thus...