Word: agrarian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Krista Mahr's article on rich states renting agricultural land in developing states presents a thorny question: Can the hungry be a provider to the well-fed? Let's take the case of the Philippines, my homeland. Most Filipino farmers are poor and neglected. The Department of Agrarian Reform can't even protect their rights against greedy hacienda owners. Without sufficient safeguards, food-security agreements might only aggravate the lot of farmers and their families from Sudan to Indonesia. Remember: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Dennard Dacumos, Manila...
...Traveling in India and China, I cannot help but feel that some life is cheap there. The agrarian poor do not benefit from investment, and the backward castes are left behind. It is nauseating to think how much genius lies fallow between the Indus and Yellow Rivers. It is even more revolting to consider how many simply charitable and industrious citizens and workers are outside the system...
...Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979, spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start - a bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources...
...Simultaneously, the Khmer Rouge were planning the steps necessary for a radical shift to an agrarian society. During the Khmer Rouge's nascent days, the movement's leader, Pol Pot, had grown to admire the way the tribes on the outskirts of Cambodia's jungles lived, free of Buddhism, money or education, and now he wanted to foist the same philosophy on the entire nation. Pol Pot envisioned a Cambodia absent of any social institutions like banks or religions or any modern technology. He sought to triple agricultural production in a year, absent the manpower or means necessary...
...election, Alec McGinnis noted in the Washington Post that, in addition to being the nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama could also break another barrier: He could become the first “metropolitan” candidate in a nation still obsessed with its agrarian heritage. “Would a big-city president address as never before,” McGinnis asked, “the problems of our urban cores—blighted housing, shoddy public transit, dismal schools...