Word: oiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...different dialect. The miracle country is growing somewhat threadbare. Throughout most of the 1970s, the Ivory Coast enjoyed annual economic-growth rates of 6% to 7%, the most vibrant in former French West Africa. The trend has reversed since coffee and cocoa prices collapsed in the 1980s. High oil prices mean a gallon of gasoline sells at $5. From 1986 to 1989, export earnings dropped from $3.2 billion to $2.5 billion, while costs continued to rise. Total debt, $12 billion, rose from 37% of gross domestic product in 1979 to 130% in 1991, effectively crowding out the private sector...
There was much optimism in Africa in the 1970s, in the first full decade or two after the granting of independence. Africa had its Golconda of commodities -- cocoa, coffee, copper and palm oil -- and their prices were high. Africans borrowed against those prices; the world happily lent. Unlike other countries now heavily indebted, African nations owe the bulk of their debt to First World governments, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank rather than to commercial banks and other private creditors...
...World Bank report looked at the African regression: modest development after independence in the '60s, stagnation in the '70s, decline in the '80s. Factors such as drought and the oil crisis obviously played a role. But the principal cause of the continent's wasting disease was seen as a fundamentally wrong approach to economics. Instead of developing and diversifying agriculture, most African countries tried, often ineptly or corruptly, to industrialize at a time when much of the world was already on its way into the postindustrial age. African industrial products never had a chance to compete in a high-tech...
...smuggling of Zambian gemstones. At least 10 million of 26 million Kenyans make a living from small-scale cash-crop farming, carpentry, metalworking, tailoring, illicit brewing and running private transport. Secondhand clothes are imported from Europe and America and sold by the roadside. Packing cases are fashioned into furniture. Oil drums are made into roofing sheets, frying pans, barbecues, stoves, knives and lamps. Cars that cannot be repaired are salvaged piecemeal and turned into donkey carts. Much of this unofficial labor is carried out in the open air and is called jua kali -- "hot sun." As multinational companies are driven...
...conventional wisdom during and after the Gulf War was that it was among the worst environmental disasters in history. After all, hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil leaked into the sands of Kuwait and the waters of the Persian Gulf or burned off into acrid clouds of choking pollution. But a newly published study has reached a surprising conclusion: while some stretches of the Saudi coastline were indeed fouled with oil, the hydrocarbons had largely degraded just four months after the war was over. Even more startling: parts of the gulf were actually cleaner after the war than...