Word: droughts
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...hungry. "Whole families are suffering because of a desperate shortage of food, which has forced them to eat just one meal a day of maize, leaves or wild fruits," wfp's executive director James Morris said last week. Niger has been here before. Between 1968 and 1973 a severe drought across the Sahel killed as many as a quarter of a million people. In The Fate of Africa, an excellent new history of the continent since independence, writer Martin Meredith explains that drought "was only one aspect of the problem." Rapid population growth had forced peasants northward into pastoral areas...
...much of southern Europe, desiccated by one of the worst droughts of the last 60 years, wildfires are raging - and tempers are rising. All of Portugal, where fires are consuming an estimated 1,000 hectares a day, has been declared a severe drought zone. Spain, where rainfall in the first half of the year was 35% below average, is still in a political clinch over a July 16 blaze that killed 11 firefighters; the opposition Popular Party claims the Socialist government didn't act quickly enough to bring the situation under control. Such political battles could intensify, since experts warn...
...week, the Prime Minister showered various sectors with pecuniary perks, including a 5% civil-service pay hike, a tax cut for businesses, $500 million in loans for rural villages, and a promise to increase the minimum wage. Critics contend that these policies will make little difference. "When you have drought, bird flu, stagnating tourism, decelerating growth in exports and a ballooning oil-import bill," says Chris Baker, co-author of Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, "I can't see how a small income stimulus is going to do anything." Thaksin's political rivals saw defensiveness in his actions...
...then there's the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado, which after its completion in 1963 not only robbed the Grand Canyon of sediment needed to rebuild sandbars and beaches but also drowned a spectacular landscape far bigger than the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Thanks to a multiyear drought that has only recently eased, the landscape has begun to re-emerge, energizing an effort by the Glen Canyon Institute to correct what conservationist David Brower called "America's most regretted environmental mistake." It's bound to be an uphill battle. The Glen Canyon Dam is part of the seven-state Colorado...
...debate over the O'Shaughnessy Dam continues, politicians and water managers throughout the Western states will be watching. This is a debate that has the potential to broaden into a long-overdue discussion of just how the rapidly growing population of this arid, drought-prone region plans to meet its water needs without sucking dry every river and aquifer. The future of development in the West may rest on what happens to this elegant dam and the valley it flooded so long...