Word: livestock
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...these tawny September days, irony builds within irony. Personal suffering among farmers is most intense in the Southeast, where they have lost $2 billion in crops and livestock. The rains needed for the red clay failed to fall three out of the past six years. In July the unrelenting heat went to 105 degrees, then 107 degrees. Mockery came in the past few weeks when the heavens relented, bringing floods followed by crabgrass. Southern fields look green, but the corn leaves are twisted in knots, the peanut crop has shriveled...
Meanwhile, the Cameroon army struggled to navigate bulldozers over the precipitous mountain climbs and into the villages to dig graves for the dead livestock. But the primitive dirt tracks, which provide the only access to the hamlets for some 40 miles around, were muddied by pelting rains. Therefore the burials were slowed considerably while troops laboriously dug the graves by hand. Officials began to fear that the bloated carcasses of cows, goats, pigs and chickens rotting in the equatorial heat would lead to a cholera or typhoid epidemic. Army efforts were further hampered by the handful of survivors who refused...
Other vast surpluses abound. At the beginning of last month, the U.S. held 1.9 billion bu. of wheat, a record overstock, and 847 million bu. of soybeans, almost 40% more than at the same time last year. Kansas alone held 178.8 million bu. of grain sorghum, a livestock feed, almost 80% more than in June 1985. The U.S. is producing a huge excess of milk as well, a problem reduced only partly by the USDA's program this year to pay thousands of dairy farmers some $1.8 billion to send their herds to slaughter or export markets...
Rumania has been hard hit by the disaster at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April. After the accident spread radioactive fallout across Eastern Europe, the European Community banned imports of crops and livestock from the region for three weeks. The embargo slashed the Bucharest regime's foreign-exchange earnings and forced the cash-short country to miss several million dollars in debt payments to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other Western lenders...
ITALY. Border patrols halted 32 freight cars loaded with cattle, sheep and horses from Poland and Austria for nearly a week before forcing them to return. Worried inspectors found abnormally high levels of radiation in many of the 908 animals in the shipment. Italy later banned imports of meat, livestock and vegetables from most of Eastern Europe...