Word: droughts
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...even more difficult for urbanized Chadians to endure. When Tombalbaye decreed that high government officials, regardless of their religious beliefs, be among the first group of initiates, the Minister of Agriculture argued that the two-month program would interfere with his efforts to increase farm production in the drought-stricken country. The Education Minister also objected that the initiation of teachers would interrupt schooling. A seven-month delay was granted, but this July a thousand Chadian officials were sent south to Yondo camps...
Even the beggars of Calcutta are better off than the estimated 15 million people now starving in West Bengal. "In the Kutch district of drought-stricken Gujarat," adds Shepherd, "peasants patiently wait for dogs and vultures to finish picking at the carcasses of dead cattle. The hungry gather up the bones and sell them to mills where they are made into bone dust, a kind of fertilizer...
...Africa's Sahel, the rains last June broke a six-year drought, but the area's 25 million inhabitants are not yet out of danger. Ten million people still suffer from malnutrition and will need outside aid for at least two years. "Of the estimated 4 million refugees in grim, barren camps," reports TIME Correspondent Lee Griggs, "many are young children, their bodies already so malnourished that they are easy prey to diseases ranging from measles to meningitis to pneumonia. Often they find it too difficult to eat or drink with out assistance." At least 3 million nomads...
...drought struck again, the Sahel could probably count on foreign help similar to this year's 34-nation relief operation, which delivered 560,000 tons of food-one-third of it from the U.S. What is doubtful, however, is whether an emergency aid effort could rescue the tens of millions of potential starvation victims in case of disastrous harvests in India, China or another heavily populated country. There is probably not enough elasticity in the world food production and distribution systems to do that now, despite the impressive gains that agriculture has made in the past quarter-century...
...rich fields of India's Rejasthan state, where the monsoon rains usually sweep in faithfully each summer, the rice crop has been devastated by the first drought in years. Eastward on the Indian subcontinent, great floods have ruined the Bangladesh harvest. Far off in Africa's Sahel region, six years of drought have only recently been interrupted by rain. In the U.S., both the corn and soybean crops will fall far below expectations this year because of a freakish succession of excess spring rains, summer drought and early fall frost...