Word: guano
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Later, the author goes on and states:"...the only time foreign investors got really excited about Peru was during the 19th century when 80 percent of the government revenues were derived from the export of guano (which is, well, bird shit)." Guano is a fertilizer obtained in the coastal islands that was used extensively to spur agricultural output, feeding an increasing world population. Does it matter to Peru's current crisis that it exported guano in the 19th century...
...economy is a basket case, boasting the second lowest per capita GNP in Latin America. Despite impressive metal resources, the only time foreign investors got really excited about Peru was during the 19th century, when 80 percent of government revenues were derived from the export of guano (which is, well, bird shit...
...buying only the most expensive custom-made English clothes. They were so beautifully tailored they gave the impression their wearer had never suffered poverty, hardship and the terrible smell of thousands of chickens dying." That Perelman's similarly attired literary colleagues were not all fleeing from the aroma of guano is irrelevant; once the feather complex has been formulated, all facts must bend...
...world's total fish catch. Now, the warm equatorial water is blocking the upwelling of nutrients from the sea bottom. The result is economic disaster. The anchovies are largely gone. Coastal waters have turned into a sludge of rotting plankton and fish. Sea birds, whose droppings (guano) are an important source of fertilizer, are dying off for lack of food. When the last severe El Niño struck in 1972, the reduced catch of the cheap anchovies raised poultry prices in the U.S. by more than...
Navassa. Both the U.S. and Haiti claim this two-mile-long, uninhabited, guano-covered Caribbean rock. The quarrel goes back to an 1856 congressional act allowing U.S. citizens to claim certain islands in order to mine sea bird droppings, which are used as fertilizer. Negotiations to solve the dispute broke off in 1979 when the Haitians refused a U.S. request for fishing rights. Only the seagulls were relieved...