Once again, it is drought time in the northeast of Brazil, with low rainfall painting the landscape hardscrabble beige and green, too parched to sustain the corn, beans and rice that people here depend on to survive.
It traces the history of farming on the Island from the Native American period, when corn sustained the area's inhabitants, to the present when truck farming and grapes have replaced potatoes as the major focuses of agriculture, and continuing development threatens the industry's survival.
A thousand years ago, a traveler following McNab's route west from the camp at La Corona would have passed through a summer blazing with the fires of thousands of cornfields, which grew the corn that sustained civilization in the Maya lowlands.
Their economy, based on fishing and the cultivation of corn (maize) and cassava, sustained as many as 60,000 people in villages led by caciques (chieftains).
Corn, legumes and banana crops that sustained a community of 400 and sold at markets to pay for children's schooling would take months to re-establish.
I include cornmeal in my grouping of Thanksgiving foods, as corn is one of the Native American foods that sustained the Pilgrims during their first difficult years in the colonies.
The emergence of Argentine hemorrhagic fever in east-central Argentina during the 1950s, and its expansion to north-central Argentina, has been directly linked to development of agricultural activities (mainly corn growing) that sustain the virus's main reservoir, the corn mouse (Calomys musculinus).
Sugar cane, tomato, and rice crops also sustained damage from the hurricane, and in its wake the state's corn production was down by 26 percent from the previous year.
Most of the families pay rent for the couple of acres they use to grow the corn that sustains them.
