Word: rice
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MANAGUA, Nicaragua--Managua's ragged army of the poor awakens early to prepare for work. Within the thousands of cardboard and tin shacks that ring the Nicaraguan capital, the breakfasts of beans and rice are headed over wood stoves and eaten quickly, patched clothing is pulled on, and an army of maids, servants, shoe-shines, car-washers, vendors of every conceivable food and item, beggars and hustlers, young boys and old women, all hanging to the economy by the edges of their fingernails, drifts off to work...
...immediate history of the present crisis is one of lost opportunities. The production of basic food grains--corn, wheat, rice, barley, and oats--totalled one billion metric tons in 1973, enough to adequately feed four billion people if distributed equally, and the March 15, 1974 report to the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, shows that there was a world-wide surplus of grains as recently as 1972. It shows grain production recovering in the years between 1968 and 1971, making up a cumulative deficit of over 100 million metric tons, which had resulted from disastrous harvests...
There is no overt panic, but Saigon's 3 million residents, and the countless refugees streaming into the already overcrowded city, are shaken, afraid, even desperate. "We have nowhere to go!" cried a Saigon bar girl. "I am frightened, but what can I do? I have bought rice and dried fish. When the Viet Cong come, I will lock the door and wait...
...movie is based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who really knew how to heap on the plot. Burroughs may not have been much of a stylist, but any writer who can bring submarines and Brontosauri together deserves respect. Just for the record, Bowen Tyler (McClure) and Lisa Clayton (Penhaligon) are passengers on a ship that is torpedoed by Captain von Schoenvorts (John McEnery). Along with a few surviving British officers, Tyler takes over the German submarine (don't ask how; luck has something to do with it), which gets lost somewhere around South America. Water and supplies...
Elsewhere in Cambodia, the story is just as grim. Several towns on the Mekong River are still under pressure, while even Battambang city, 160 miles northwest of Phnom-Penh in the heart of what was once Cambodia's rice granary, might soon fall. Each night the Communists overrun another tiny outpost protecting the city. An inspection of Battambang's defenses, says a recent visitor, turned up "empty holes and no soldiers to fill them...