Word: rice
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...willing to question years of received wisdom. While Laura Bush condemned the Burmese junta, the Obama Administration has held relatively high-level talks with the country's leadership - in March, Stephen Blake, the State Department's director of Southeast Asian affairs, met Foreign Minister Nyan Win in Naypyidaw. Condoleezza Rice would skip ASEAN's Regional Forum, and the Bush Administration refused to sign ASEAN's Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. The treaty is pretty innocuous - it merely pledges signatories to uphold a zone of peace in Southeast Asia. But the Bush Administration objected to Burma's membership in ASEAN...
...average food supplier or bank may know little, if anything, about halal. In Europe - the biggest growth region according to the Halal Journal - young devout Muslims are hungry for Islamic versions of mainstream pleasures such as fast food. "The second- and third-generation Muslims are fed up with having rice and lentils every day," observes Darhim Hashim, CEO of the Malaysia-based International Halal Integrity Alliance. "They're saying, 'We want pizzas, we want Big Macs.' " Domino's now sources halal pepperoni from a Malaysian company for the pizzas it sells from Kuala Lumpur to Birmingham; KFC is testing halal...
...conventional farms. While they required more labor, the cost was more than offset by savings in commercial nitrogen, insecticides and herbicides. In Africa, where labor is cheap and capital scarce, the benefits would be magnified. According to Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, past green revolutions boosted production of wheat and rice at the expense of other food. Using land for cash crops, she argues, actually decreased total food production. "You're losing because you're measuring only the single commodity," Shiva says...
Eighteen months ago, when the world was awash in asset bubbles, there was perhaps no market more overheated than commodities. Prices of everything from iron ore to palm oil to corn reached dizzying heights. Crude oil nearly quintupled in five years; rice tripled in only five months. World Bank President Robert Zoellick called rising food and oil prices a "man-made catastrophe" that had the potential to quickly erase years of progress in overcoming poverty. Pundits dusted off Malthusian theories that the planet was physically unable to support the burgeoning appetites of an increasingly wealthy global population...
...film relates how Duras' impoverished and widowed mother struggled to establish a rice plantation straddling the Gulf of Siam in southern Cambodia. Having failed to adequately grease the required palms in the land-registry office, the mother, brilliantly played by Isabelle Huppert, is assigned land that she later finds is prone to flooding from the sea. In her attempt to hold back the tide, Huppert rallies local villagers to build a barrier against the ocean. It's a Sisyphean task that sets her against colonial functionaries who have designs on her property, and a rapacious tycoon, Monsieur Jo (Randal Douc...