Word: largest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...heavy demand for wood has led to the deforestation of vast tracts in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. Last April the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network, a small but feisty environmental group based in Tokyo, presented the giant Marubeni Corp., one of the world's largest importers of tropical hardwoods, with a mock award: a cardboard chain saw for winning the Grand Prix for Tropical Forest Destruction...
...lumber business is only one of many Japanese industries that have had far-reaching impact on the global environment. A combination of traditional crafts and consumer tastes for the exotic makes Japan the world's largest market for many threatened species and the products created from them. Over the years, elephants by the thousands have been slaughtered so that their ivory can be used, for example, in Japanese signature seals, and wedding ornaments are fashioned from the shells of endangered hawksbill turtles. Japanese fishermen have drawn impassioned criticism for their use of huge drift nets across vast expanses...
Logging is only one cause of deforestation, but in Southeast Asia it is an important one. And Japan is the world's largest consumer of tropical timber: in 1986 it imported 15.7 million cubic meters, approximately equal to the imports of the entire European Community. Tokyo has begun to finance programs aimed at replanting trees in Southeast Asia but has not yet tried to limit wood imports...
...diet. Japan is currently embroiled in a dispute with the U.S. and several Pacific nations about the charge that the Japanese squid fishermen inflict untold damage on marine life with their drift nets. Taiwan and South Korea also have extensive drift-net operations, but Japan's are the largest. And though U.S. fishermen, as the Japanese are quick to point out, use drift nets, they tend to be much smaller than the Asian variety...
...American tycoon tries to make an investment in Japan but runs into an intricate web of cozy corporate ties that shuts out foreigners. At the stockholders' meeting of the company in which he has become the largest single owner, the proceedings are interrupted by a handful of racketeers, who hurl derisive remarks at the company president. In a vote, none of the more than 200 shareholders at the meeting support the outsider's nomination of board members...