Word: venezuela
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week the countries of the Caribbean, 27 nations in all, from such tiny islands as Grenada and St. Lucia, to such coastal powers as Venezuela, Mexico and the U.S., took a long step toward improving the region. At a meeting in the old Spanish colonial port city of Cartagena, Colombia, a majority gave initial approval to two treaties that should help encourage cooperative action toward a cleanup. One of those pacts governs all types of pollution; the other deals specifically with oil spills. Negotiated under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Program, the treaties are relatively toothless declarations...
More and more Caribbean nations are tearing up irreplaceable rain forests to plant such export crops as bananas, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee and cacao. On the sea, tankers, carrying oil from Venezuela and more distant shores, crisscross the Caribbean; as much as half of the U.S.'s imported oil comes through these crowded sea arteries, many of them leading through dangerous, narrow straits...
Inland the story is worse. Each year nearly 4.4 million acres of forest are destroyed. In Central America, vast tracts have been converted to pasture land, largely to raise beef for the U.S. market, while natural grasslands in Venezuela and Colombia go largely unused. Still another reason for loss of forests is the in creasing incidence of slash-and-burn agriculture. As impoverished peasants lose their traditional lands to the spreading single-crop plantations, they move higher and higher up forested mountains, clearing away timber for firewood and subsistence farming. In Haiti and Jamaica, the results have been disastrous...
Even if demand bounces up to OPEC's target level of 17.5 million bbl. per day, the group still faces the danger of widespread cheating on quotas. Similar production agreements in the past have crumbled as several countries, including Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela, offered under-the-table price discounts to raise sales. These nations are buffeted by economic and financial difficulties that will make more cheating almost irresistible...
...Venezuela, for example, has run up a foreign debt of $25 billion. The country's per capita output of goods and services has sunk to a level about 15% below where it was in 1978. Faced with a drop in oil revenues this year of at least $4 billion, Venezuela has shelved plans for construction of a new railroad, a steel mill and several highways. With an election coming in December, the government is already getting edgy about political unrest. Three journalists were jailed two weeks ago for criticizing the President...