Word: droughts
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Typhoons, droughts and other natural disasters have contributed to Viet Nam's agricultural problems, but government incompetence has been the principal cause. Bureaucratic foul-ups hindered the planting of new strains of rice that are more resistant to drought, and the distribution of pesticides in areas infested by plant pests has been delayed. Rice production is declining in the once prosperous Mekong Delta. Hanoi had announced that it was willing to trade consumer goods such as electric fans for rice, hoping to induce peasants to sell their crops to the government instead of on the black market. When...
...outsiders, there does not seem to be much in Chad worth fighting about. Carved out of former French Equatorial Africa, it is impoverished, plagued by drought, malaria and periodic locust swarms. Its only known resource is a uranium deposit far in the north. Perhaps it is Chad's poverty (annual per capita income: $120) that makes its religious and ethnic rivalries so fierce. With so little to go around, each side must fight all the harder to obtain a life-sustaining share...
...persistent corruption of American capitalism and, worse, Western morals. He rejects it all, railing and carping in Updike's brilliant satirization of tunnel-eyed Marxist bombast, and secures his not-so-willing nation against the world by the sheer power of his will. The only problem is the drought...
...Ellello*u, the drought that brings his nation to the limits of starvation is more than a mischance of the elements or even, as one of his enemies calls it, "bad ecology." It represents a blot on the nation's soul, a demon that has to be exorcised, the work of an angry Allah demanding sacrifice. So he sacrifices. First goes the ancient king who had been his prisoner since the revolution, then an American foreign service officer who tries to bring food supplies across the border from a less doctrinaire socialist, and less impoverished, neighbor. In each case Ellello...
...wanders out into the desert, accompanied by the dearest of his four wives, to begin a search for the oracle that, he is told, will tell him how to end the drought. It seems cornballed at first, simple adventurism, but Updike is never simple. Through Ellello*u. Updike sings an elegy to the open spaces he seems to have just now found: the vast blue sky of Africa, and the rolling plains of the 1950s America in which both Ellellou and Updike attended college. This makes the most beautiful part of the book, striking in its images and complex...