Word: sorghum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surprising prognosis from China's most successful director, whose early films?Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern?were so grand and ambitious that they burned the country's landscapes onto the retinas of filmgoers around the world. And the bleak outlook is especially striking given that Zhang now looks poised to hit a new career high with Hero, a martial arts fable complete with superstar cast and ravishing cinematography. Last week, Hero premiered at a screening in China's official Holy of Holies, the Great Hall of the People. When it played a weeklong Oscar-qualifying run in Shenzhen...
...director that Zhang found his true calling and an all-consuming lifelong passion. With Red Sorghum, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang proved himself in the art houses abroad. But many mainland critics remained unimpressed, accusing him of "exoticizing" the nation's feudal past and poverty-stricken countryside for foreigners. They felt he should play cultural ambassador, using his camera to burnish China's overseas image. Chinese audiences share this ambivalence. Younger moviegoers have an almost universal description of why they dislike Zhang's fixation on the past and on the countryside: "The films are really just...
Driving his Ford Explorer through fields of severely stunted corn, Roberts, 67, says, "You're looking at a sad man." Stalks that should be 12 ft. high are less than 3 ft. In the next field over, a handful of tiny, withered sorghum plants--the only ones that grew--fight an obviously losing battle against cloudless skies...
...Uganda has developed corn varieties that are more resistant to disease and thrive in soil that is poor in nitrogen. Agronomists in Kenya are developing a sweet potato that wards off viruses. Also in the works are drought-tolerant, disease-defeating and vitamin-fortified forms of such crops as sorghum and cassava--hardly staples in the West, but essentials elsewhere in the world. The key, explains economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is not to dictate food policy from the West but to help the developing world build its own biotech infrastructure so it can produce...
Bioengineering has tremendous potential in the developing world. The U.S., Canada, China and Argentina contain 99% of the global area of genetically modified crops, whereas yields of sorghum and millet in sub-Saharan Africa have not increased since the 1960s. Green groups hoping to earn the trust of the developing world should lobby hard for the resources of Big Agriculture to be plowed into discovering crop varieties that can handle drought and thrive on small-scale farms...