Word: cornelis
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...scans the teeming plain. More than 2,000 residents of this parish, Lokali, have come to collect food aid on a hot Saturday in May, and though the crowds have dwindled as the sun sinks and people drag or carry home their sacks - a month's ration of mostly corn, with some beans - many recipients remain. They stand or sit in groups, waiting for food if they haven't yet been called, and arguing over how to divide the rations they've received. At the center with the food stash, police clutch assault rifles to scare off bandits, as well...
...also the first to be slashed. Martin Devenish, an Irish priest who runs a technical college near Moruongor parish, is proud to be teaching trades that could bring industry to Karamoja: carpentry, tailoring and bricklaying. Today dozens of adult students sit at benches, eating their midday meal, mostly corn provided by WFP. But each time the priest turns on the radio and hears about possible food-aid cuts, "I'm thinking what about here!," Devenish says...
...American Midwest is essentially the granary of the world, supplying corn, wheat and other crops to markets from Chile to China. But all that food doesn't grow by itself. In 2006 U.S. farmers used more than 21 million tons of nitrogen, phosphorus and other fertilizers to boost their crops, and all those chemicals have consequences far beyond the immediate area. When the spring rains come, fertilizer from Midwestern farms drains into the Mississippi river system and down to Louisiana, where the agricultural sewage pours into the Gulf of Mexico. Just as fertilizer speeds the growth of plants on land...
...nutrient pollution that ends up in the Gulf comes from the hundreds of thousands of farms in the Midwest. The only sure way to shrink the dead zone is to reduce the amount of fertilizer running off those farms. But thanks in part to the push for corn-based ethanol and the skyrocketing price of food crops, U.S. farmers are planting more acres for corn than they have since World War II - including 15 million more acres last year than in 2006. Although there are measures farmers can take to limit fertilizer runoff, those changes are expensive, and there...
Unfortunately, the dead zone isn't simply an environmental failure, but also a consequence of our national agricultural policy, which subsidizes farmers to grow vast, heavily fertilized quantities of corn and other grains. The pork-laden farm bill, which recently passed Congress over President George W. Bush's veto, will only worsen the problem. And even if we can begin to reduce the future flow of fertilizer, repeated dead zones are having a cumulative effect, with smaller amounts of nitrates and other chemicals in the Gulf having a larger hypoxic impact than in the past. "We have to decide...