Word: droughts
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...threatened the flagship campus of the University of California in Berkeley. A few months later, the destructive hand of Mother Nature moved south, where it has stayed. As floods swept through the Los Angeles suburbs, the rest of America must have been wondering what happened to the California drought they'd been hearing so much about...
...California were a country, local politicians like to point out, it would have the seventh largest economy in the world. But that economy may not be eternally resilient. The seven-year drought in the Central Valley cost farmers roughly $1.7 billion. The three days of rioting in 1992 cost 57 lives and $1 billion in destroyed property. Last summer brush fires devoured nearly 1,000 homes in some of the richest enclaves in America. All the while the re- engineering of America's post-cold war economy drained California of 202,000 aerospace jobs, plunging the state into the country...
...herds of dairy cows are now being injected with a genetically engineered growth hormone (BST) so that they will produce more milk than ordinary cattle. Companies such as Monsanto and Calgene are set to market bioengineered plant products, including tomatoes that ripen without rotting. And researchers are talking about drought-tolerant grass that would need almost no mowing...
After more than a decade of debate, lawsuits and battles among government officials, four federal agencies announced a sweeping plan to restore water flow to California's Sacramento Delta. One of the most biologically important estuaries in North America, the delta has been slowly dying as drought and diversion of fresh water to farms and cities have cut its flow 60%. Meanwhile, hopes dimmed for the future of an ambitious plan announced last July to reduce pollution and preserve water flow in Florida's Everglades. Most likely, the matter will now return to the courts...
Government efforts to help agriculture in general have not been especially effective for small farmers. Because of the credit crunch after the crash of 1987 and the millions of dollars in loans that went bad in the drought of the late eighties, the low interest rates of the past year and a half have not helped farmers as much as urban professionals. The constant battles over GATT and the EEC's agricultural subsidies have been more on behalf of big farming; small producers only feel the benefits of decreased foreign subsidies over several years, when market prices reset themselves...