Word: cropped
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...Japan, 75, has always shown deep sympathy for the farming millions of his subjects, and made it a royal duty to take a personal part in opening the rice-planting season. Come fall, the monarch will return to the same paddy in the imperial palace compound and harvest a crop of about 300 lbs., part of it destined for the Ise Grand Shrines as an offering to the sun goddess Amaterasu...
Never small. India's rat problem has become urgent in recent times. The reason is that India, with a bumper crop of 114 million tons of grain last year, wants to stockpile 15 million tons against possible bad times ahead. The size of the crop far outruns the country's storage capacity; much of the grain has been piled up in impromptu warehouses, like unused college buildings, where the rats are having a field day. Hence the need for more snakes. Curiously, both animals are considered sacred-and thus inviolable in some regions. Even though India has conducted...
...Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary In a characteristically dire report, the Central Intelligence Agency has just warned of potential global upheavals "almost beyond comprehension." The cause of the chaos: climatic change that will trigger massive crop failures, drought and widespread famine (see ENVIRONMENT). In contrast to this augury of doom, Herman Kahn, ebullient director of the foresighted Hudson Institute, has just looked at the future and found it good. His new book, The Next 200 Years, offers a plausible scenario of declining population growth, rising levels of affluence and, given the right so cio-economic conditions, "virtually eternal...
Drought-Prone. There is ample evidence, the CIA report contends, that the new era is already under way. In the early '60s crop failures hit India and Central Asia, causing major economic and political changes. India had to import massive quantities of U.S. grain, and poor farm yields in the Soviet Union undermined the power of Premier Nikita Khrushchev and contributed to his downfall. The Soviets also suffered agricultural disasters in 1972 and 1974. The drought-prone countries of sub-Saharan Africa have not yet recovered from a recent six-year period of little or no rain. Rice shortages...
...Wisconsin studies, the CIA report concludes that a return to the conditions that prevailed during the Little Ice Age would reduce the frequency of India's monsoons and cause droughts on the subcontinent as often as every four years. This climatic change would also cause major crop failures and famine every five years in China and loss of the Soviet Union's wheat fields in Kazakhstan. Cooler temperatures could also cut crop production in Canada, as well as Northern Europe...