Word: peasant
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Nature branded a curse on the Northeast. Except in a narrow coastal belt, rain is so scant that 87% of the area consists of parched, brown sertāo, a rolling hinterland matted with cactus-tough scrub where peasants hack at the hard soil with primitive hoes. Two months ago, the first rains in eight months brought a green fuzz to the sertāo. But drought had already ruined this year's crop of beans, corn and manioc-root flour, mainstays of the peasant diet. Famine swept the sertāo, sending thousands of camponeses to the towns...
...Prohibited. Over the years, droves of peasants have fled from the dry hinterland to the region's fertile seacoast. But no bounty is to be found there either. A few feudal landlords own virtually all the land, and the best the peasant can expect is a life as a sharecropper or tenant farmer. As a sharecropper, he gives the landlord one-third to one-half of everything he grows, usually must sell his share to his patrāo for 30% to 50% below market price. At the plantation store where he buys supplies, interest on credit runs...
...livestock (animals eat too much) and is anxious to hold down food crops because such industrial crops as sugar and cotton bring him a higher profit. A state such as Rio Grande do Norte therefore imports 70% of its food from southern Brazil at inflationary prices that the peasant (average annual income: $23) cannot afford...
...great race to the cities began after World War II, when foreign investment set off a small-scale industrial boom in Latin America. But the penniless, often illiterate, peasant soon finds the city glitter an artificial light. He may get a better-paying job, or he may not; un employment and underemployment are widespread. Even if he does, he rarely finds a decent place to live. Housing is short, and landlords greedy. He usually throws together his own shack in some squatter's field...
...audience, Europe Number One tries to stick to the facts. Time and again, its hard-driving news squads have scored impressive beats on RTF. In 1959 Europe Number One scooped RTF by six hours with on-the-scene recordings of the Frejus Dam break. During last summer's peasant sitdown strike in Brittany, RTF prudently quoted Lc Figaro, a Parisian daily that put the rosiest possible complexion on the strike; Number One's mikes picked up, live, the protests of the Breton peasants themselves...