Word: importance
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...countries in Europe. Striptease shows, topless dancers, dirty books and X-rated movies were, legally, at least, not allowed into the country. At the most, an occasional street vendor would risk arrest by the morals squad and peddle a few bootlegged copies of Playboy or some other forbidden girlie import. The morals squad still exists, but since the April revolution, the risk has gone out of eroticism. In fact, one of the curious consequences of the coup that ousted the old regime is Europe's biggest explosion of pornography since Denmark legalized practically everything...
...strategy has been to plow profits from the oil industry -which provides 40% of the nation's wealth but less than 1% of its jobs-into agriculture. Although Venezuela has vast tracts of potentially productive farm land, agriculture has been so mismanaged that the country will have to import $450 million worth of food this year. To curtail a rural exodus that has already concentrated 78% of his 12 million countrymen in the nation's major cities, Pérez has offered incentives to lure people back to the fields. The government promised to assume past debts incurred...
...starter, the Israeli pound was devalued an astonishing 43%, the eighth devaluation in 26 years. Imports of 29 luxury items, including autos, were banned for six months, and import taxes on 39 other luxury items were raised 10% and 20%. A six-month moratorium on the construction of all public and luxury buildings, imposed last July, was ex tended for another year. In an effort to discourage foreign travel, both the travel tax and the tax on foreign air fares were raised significantly...
...just for the oil and fertilizer supplies (the consequences of which have already been devastating). Even giving away food creates problems with production incentives and reduces attention paid to the production system. It doesn't solve the dependency question but only submerges it. At the current rate, food import requirements are estimated to rise to 85 million tons by the mid-'80s. That amounts to over $17 billion for the poor countries per year at current prices, despite the enormous proportions of exchange reserves already absorbed by past deptservicing requirements. We expect them to choose between food, fertilizer and repayment...
Furthermore, the Conference has not been able to deal substantively with the structure of food production and use in the rich nations. The purchasing power of the rich has meant the import of protein and its conversion into meat at incredible and growing rates. The export of our consumer culture, the development of export-oriented cash-crops, and the side-effects of the Green revolution involve additional distortions central to issues in which the rich nations are involved. These factors collectively inhibit, rather than promote self-reliant food supply systems in the Third World...