Word: sahelian
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Dates: during 1974-1974
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Nearly half a billion people are suffering from some form of hunger; 10,000 of them die of starvation each week in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are all too familiar severe shortages of food in the sub-Saharan Sahelian countries of Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta and Niger; also in Ethiopia, northeastern Brazil, India and Bangladesh. India alone needs 8 to 10 million tons of food this year from outside sources, or else as many as 30 million people might starve...
...Sahelian countries, in Greece, Cyprus, Chile, Vietnam and countless other countries around the world people are dying while the United States pursues capitalistic ventures meant to buttress its high materialistic standards of living. And Heilbroner awaits the "negative factors" (the Malthusian reapers--war, malnutrition, epidemics) that will eventually correct the Western way of thinking...
...Sahelian zone countries of Western Africa--Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad--Western science and technology in an indiscriminate and "minimal" way, has actually increased the amount of devastation wrought by a 6-year old drought. A famine in the six countries last year left as many as 100,000 dead and 7 million others dependent on foreigners' food handouts. The famine continues and every day more West African nomads die under the hot desert sun. An FAO report on the Sahel says that the destructive farming and grazing practices now more frequent than ever in the Sahel...
Even if this year's relief effort forestalls mass starvation, the long-term outlook for Africa's hunger belt is at best grim. A ministerial-level committee of the Sahelian nations is seeking foreign grants of $700 million to fund 126 long-range projects, such as dams, reforestation, transport networks and rebuilding of decimated herds. But the only certain means of guaranteeing that the present catastrophe will not repeat itself lies with population control rather than with food supplies...
Only last month United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim returned from a tour of drought-stricken African states and declared that several of the six nations of the Sahelian strip just beneath the Sahara could literally disappear as a result of the devastation spread by a six-year dry spell. Last week, in landlocked Niger, a military coup toppled the democratic government that President Hamani Diori, 57, had conscientiously administered since he led his people to independence from France in 1960. Though the coup was largely bloodless, three people were reported killed, including Diori's wife, who was shot...