Word: semiarid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Modi grew up in Vadnagar, a small town of 40,000 in the semiarid scrub about 200 kilometers from the Pakistani border. In many ways Vadnagar, like much of the rest of Gujarat, encapsulates the best of India. It is prosperous and progressive, a place where parents bring up their children as vegetarians and teetotalers and dreaming of being managers in the state's western industrial belt. In its bazaar, Hindus and Muslims mix freely as neighbors and friends. There is little here to nurture hate in a young Hindu. But the people of Vadnagar remember two things about their...
...While much of the focus is on Africa, developed but semiarid European countries along the northern Mediterranean also are suffering from desertification and deforestation. Much of the soil of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal has become saline and sterile as a result of fire, drought, floods, overgrazing, overtilling and other factors. Such degradation can be irreversible. As industry, tourism and farming place greater stress on coastal areas in particular - and groundwater levels decline - "water wars" are becoming internal. Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards recently took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona to protest government plans to divert the country...