Word: rural
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Costa Rica is Central America's stablest democracy. It does not have an army: that institution was abolished in 1949, and order is maintained largely by 7,000 lightly armed civil and rural guardsmen. The country's 1982 per capita income of $1,164 is the second highest, after Panama, in Central America, and its society is largely lacking in the unhealthy extremes of wealth and poverty that afflict Guatemala and El Salvador...
...than the harrowing drought of 1973, which killed more than half a million. Refugees throughout these afflicted areas are often packed so tightly into camps that contagious illnesses spread swiftly and fatally. Kwashiorkor, a protein-deficiency disease, is sweeping through the infant population in South Africa's black rural areas, but many people cannot raise the $3.50 hospital admission...
...most cases, governments have been unable or unwilling to cope with the problems caused by drought. Hoping to mollify the politically volatile inhabitants of urban slums, authorities in Zambia and Zaire have held prices for farm produce artificially low and thus exacerbated rural poverty. Zimbabwe's Prime Minister, Robert Mugabe, withheld assistance from those parts of the drought-stricken southwestern province of Matabeleland where rebel factions were most active. Ethiopia continues to spend more than 30% of its budget on arms and less than 5% on importing food...
SOUTH AFRICA. Rural areas, constituting 70% of the nation, have for two years been weathering a drought that is in some areas the worst in more than two centuries. Homeowners in Johannesburg are not permitted to refill their swimming pools, while residents of Durban must now wash their clothes and nurse their flowers with bathwater. But the effects of drought are most urgent in the black tribal homelands. In Zululand, 200,000 cattle without grazing land are expected to die; 98% of the 68,000 wild donkeys in Bophuthatswana will be shot on government orders so that more pasture will...
...Poznan had its political moments. The Pope praised farmers of the region for struggling to retain their "profound link with the land." Referring directly to the banned independent farmers' union, John Paul recalled the support that the late Polish Primate Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski had shown to "representatives of Rural Solidarity" during a meeting in April 1981. The crowd roared even louder when John Paul told them he had come to "kneel in this place and pay homage," in a reference to a memorial to Polish workers slain in Poznan during riots in 1956. The monument, which consists...