Word: mid-1980s
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...situation is not yet as grim as Ethiopia's great famine of the mid-1980s, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but neither is it as straightforward. In the battle against hunger, geopolitics has intruded into the picture. Currently, Ethiopia is locked in a border war with Eritrea over an inconsequential strip of no-man's-land. The conflict, experts estimate, is costing the Ethiopian authorities about $1 million a day. Politicians and aid officials in donor countries think that money should be used to buy food rather than guns...
...brief Author's Note, Ondaatje explains the historical background for his fictional events: "From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Sri Lanka was in a crisis that involved three essential groups: the government, the antigovernment insurgents in the south and the separatist guerrillas in the north. Both the insurgents and the separatists had declared war on the government. Eventually, in response, legal and illegal government squads were known to have been sent out to hunt down the separatists and the insurgents...
...ever faced. The report specifies some common-sense steps in the right direction. For instance, governments can eliminate the estimated $700 billion in annual subsidies that spur the destruction of ecosystems. In Tunisia, water is priced at one-seventh of what it costs to pump, encouraging waste. In the mid-1980s, Indonesia spent $150 million annually to subsidize pesticide use. With access to cheap chemicals, Indonesian farmers poured pesticides onto their rice fields, killing pests, to be sure, but also causing human illness and wiping out birds and other creatures that ate the pests. When Indonesia ended the subsidies...
...Plain, it has been stable and relatively peaceful since it gained independence in 1961. For two decades, it steered a course of self-reliant socialism--a one-party government controlled the economy, taxed mightily and spent lavishly; its literacy rate was among the highest in Africa. But by the mid-1980s, Tanzania's economy was flat-lining, with hyperinflation, huge budget and trade deficits, and massive dependence on foreign aid. Today, after 15 years of IMF-imposed structural adjustment, administered most effectively since 1995 under President Benjamin Mkapa, Tanzania has "made great progress in getting its macroeconomic situation in order...
...them unable to afford the most basic needs. These men and women, almost all subsistence or small-plot cash-crop farmers, have been structurally adjusted half to death. Though Adams points to progress--51% of Tanzanians now survive on $1 a day or less, down from 65% in the mid-1980s--his statistic makes Tanzanian analysts laugh bitterly, because it misses the fact that everything in a farmer's life costs more today. Currency devaluation and the elimination of agricultural subsidies doubled and quadrupled fertilizer prices, according to a study by the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Farmers couldn't borrow, because...