Word: droughts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shoreline, contaminating the land and afflicting millions of Uzbeks with gastritis, typhoid and throat cancer. In Beijing, one-third of the city's wells have gone dry, and the water table drops by as much as 2 meters (2.2 yards) a year. In the Western U.S., four years of drought have left municipalities and agricultural interests tussling over diminishing water stocks. Says Ivan Restrepo, head of the Center for Ecodevelopment in Mexico, where as many as 30 million people do not have safe drinking water: "We've been enduring a crisis for several years now, but it is in this...
...places to turn for additional cropland. Only by drawing on international stockpiles of grain have poorer countries averted widespread starvation. But those supplies are being depleted. From 1987 to 1989, the world's stock of grain fell from a 101-day surplus to a 54-day one. A drought in the U.S. breadbasket could rapidly lead to a global food calamity...
...marginal land into wasteland. This process is often driven by population pressures, which force people to work lands unsuitable for agriculture. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, settlers move into an area when it is wet and green, and then stay and remove the ground cover when the inevitable drought returns. Without a green barrier to stop them, sand dunes march inexorably forward...
...grip of a three-year drought, Israel too is far from secure, despite its formidable conservation technologies. An expected 750,000 Soviet emigres will probably settle in the cities, where the use of pure water is the highest. At the same time, 750,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip face what Zemah Ishai, Israel's water commissioner, calls a "catastrophe" because of overpumping and contamination of groundwater...
...spending have slowed the jaunty California economy. Defense contractors such as Lockheed, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas may dismiss as many as 20,000 of their 125,000 workers by year's end. And California agriculture, the state's largest industry, is suffering through the fourth year of a severe drought. "There's no engine of growth in sight," says Larry Kimbell, director of the Business Forecasting Project at the U.C.L.A. School of Management. "In the past, one sector after another took the lead in sustaining the economic expansion. But we currently see no such activity on the horizon...