Word: cropland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...limits. It is not reasonable to project a logical and necessary catastrophe." Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis goes further in his new study Global Food Progress 1991. He argues that financial investment, not fertile soil, is now the limiting factor in food production. Idle and underutilized cropland in the U.S. and Argentina alone, he says, could feed an extra 1.4 billion people...
...scarcity of fresh water for agriculture makes famines more likely every year. The world consumes more food than it produces, and yet there are few places to turn for additional cropland. Only by drawing on international stockpiles of grain have poorer countries averted widespread starvation. But those supplies are being depleted. From 1987 to 1989, the world's stock of grain fell from a 101-day surplus to a 54-day one. A drought in the U.S. breadbasket could rapidly lead to a global food calamity...
...because of erosion, deforestation and air pollution. His annual State of the World report has sold out -- 100,000 copies -- and the presses are being readied for a new run. There are scoffers, principally in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who say we can release millions of acres of cropland from the soil banks, pour on the fertilizer and meet any food demand. But Brown, with his soft voice and his inevitable bow tie, holds firm. Grain stocks are low; air pollution has reduced U.S. crop production 5% or 10%. Major weather aberrations around the globe could easily produce food...
Five hundred miles south, you can stand on the banks of the Mississippi and watch that topsoil roll by, going down to the Gulf of Mexico. The 34 million acres of fragile cropland taken out of production over the past few years have helped stem this wash, but farmers are still losing to erosion four tons of topsoil for every ton of grain produced...
...barnstormers out of Omaha had dropped in on a harvested alfalfa field. For $l.50 you rumbled through the stubble and jolted off into the air, choked with awe and fear. Above the old town, you could see the high school and your home and beyond them the vast, quilted cropland. Your world and the way you looked at it changed forever. The pilot, casual in his open, checked shirt, let you hold the wheel for a few seconds, and just then you were...