Re "Hide-and-Seek Among the Coca Leaves" (Letter From the Americas," news article, June 9), about efforts to destroy coca production in Colombia: Under Plan Colombia, the United States government has spent several billion dollars to dump carcinogenic defoliants on the crops of impoverished farmers.
In future memos, Summers proposes crop-dusting impoverished peoples with untested pharmaceuticals, buying from workers their rights, (such as the right not to be chained to factory machinery), and suggests colonizing the moon with workers in cheap, shoddy spacesuits... Referencing Swift, writer mentions he has come up with a use for extra children in Ireland.
Nicaragua also feared damage for impoverished farmers and to coffee crops that are almost ready to harvest.
Dr. Borlaug, who died at age 95 on Sept. 12, led the so-called Green Revolution that created bumper crops in once impoverished countries like Mexico, India and Pakistan.
Peasant farmers in Africa, Haiti, and other impoverished regions currently plant their crops without the benefit of high-yield seed varieties and fertilisers.
Impoverished countries may grow GMO crops for money, but as John Robbins writes, the people can't afford to eat the food themselves.
The United States has already offered Haiti the use of some helicopters, said Haitian Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph, who added that damage to housing and crops in the impoverished country was apparently extensive.
In impoverished, drought-stricken Afghanistan, the crop has proved to be one of the few reliable sources of a decent income.
In some quarters, programmes to persuade impoverished farmers to switch to legal crops have curbed supplies of raw materials.One part of the industry, however, seems to be blossoming as never before.
In the mid-1840s, thofsands of economic migrants left Ireland (a country then the most impoverished in Europe) when the potato crop failed and created what became known as the Great Hunger, or Famine – despite the fact that throughout the crisis Ireland was also exporting grain to Britain as its population starved.
