Word: meagerness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Instead of model settlements, the Polonoroeste project has produced impoverished itinerants. Settlers grow rice, corn, coffee and manioc for a few years until the meager soil is exhausted, then move deeper into the forest to clear new land. The farming and burning thus become a perpetual cycle of depredation. Thousands of pioneers give up on farming altogether and migrate to the Amazon's new cities to find work. For many the net effect of the attempt to colonize Rondonia has been a shift from urban slums to Amazonian slums. Says Donald Sawyer, a demographer from the University of Minas Gerais...
...Kennedy's plan to put a man on the moon within the decade was well focused and lavishly financed. But Bush offered no price tag and no precise timetable for the "journey into tomorrow" that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Given the parlous state of NASA's meager funding and morale nowadays, that journey could abort before it takes off. Some congressional Democrats wonder where the money will come from. Warned House majority leader Richard Gephardt, in a critique of Bush's speech that reflected the view of many of his fellow Democrats: "There's no such thing...
Still, some analysts saw the meager sums as a symbol of the relative decline of America's economic clout. A top Administration official traveling with Bush conceded, "Sure, we could do a lot more to encourage economic reform in Eastern Europe. But we don't have the money. We are broke." Says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations: "The foreign policy fruits of Reaganomics are that we are the world's largest debtor nation and have a budget deficit that constrains what we can spend...
...refugees into overcrowded detention centers and camps. Upwards of 14,000 are warehoused in Hong Kong's three "closed centers," the detention areas for those boat people recognized as potentially legitimate refugees. In Thailand . about 300,000 Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese refugees are held behind barbed wire, subsisting on meager rations; some have lived this way for ten years. Detention centers at Britain's Heathrow and Gatwick airports shelter some arrivals for as long as a year. In Miami up to 700 refugees, mostly Haitians, have at times been crammed into the Krome Avenue Detention Center, which was built...
Given their meager influence on Israeli public opinion, which is moving furiously rightward, these interlocutors are strengthened by such criticism. At one meeting in Bardin's Jerusalem home, Jad Isaac, a Palestinian biology professor imprisoned after urging West Bank Arabs to plant vegetable gardens to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency, put it simply: "Even if all we do is talk, it is good...