A Year of Evil Winds

Unusual snows in South Carolina and Georgia last winter. A particularly late frost in California this March. The worst flood in the Mississippi basin since 1937. Abroad, the worst drought in India in 20 years. A landscape of dehydrated livestock carcasses dotting the dry beds of rivers in Africa. An absence of monsoons that ruined the rice crop in Southeast Asia.

Freakishly foul weather has struck so many parts of the world in the past year that some meteorologists discern a complex, long-term change in climates. Others discount the theory. On one point, however, all agree: the impact has been devastating to tourism, to industry, and most especially to the world's already hard-pressed food supplies.

The bad weather caught the U.S. squarely in the middle. By May, 12.6 million acres in seven Midwestern and Southern states were inundated; 4,000,000 acres are still flooded. Some planned cotton crops were never planted. Anticipated corn yields in Illinois are down 10% from last year, and winter-wheat losses are high. Total flood damage is estimated at $409 million.

In addition, surprise blizzards this spring cut a multimillion-dollar chunk out of livestock herds in the Rockies and Midwest. Iowa alone suffered a loss of 100,000 cattle and 44,000 hogs, worth $30 million. Snowfall and tornadoes cut peach crops in Georgia and South Carolina by 50% or more.

California's crops were severely damaged by a sequence of heavy rain last autumn, devastating cold last winter and late frost this spring. So far this year, shipments of onions, tomatoes and plums are down at least 50%; potatoes are down 33%, and lettuce 25%. With supplies short, prices paid to growers have soared in the past year: from $3 to $8 for a hundredweight of potatoes, and from $1.35 to $7 for 24 heads of lettuce.

Dry and Starving. The picture is bleaker in the Indian and African drought areas, where peasants are absorbing the blow almost full force. Soaring prices do them little good because they have no crops or livestock to sell.

This year India may have to import as many as 6,000,000 tons of wheat. A drought has forced the closing of some Indian factories and the cutting of hydroelectric power to others. Losses are estimated in the billions of dollars.

Six African states in or near the Sahara are equally parched and devastated--Senegal, Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Upper Volta and Chad. Weakened by starvation, many black and Arab tribesmen face death from epidemics of cholera and measles.

Aid is arriving in generous amounts --sorghum and grain along with $24 million in other aid from the U.S., plus a total of $50 million from the U.N., Russia, China, and the Common Market countries. But matters are often so desperate that grain for cattle is eaten by people, while critical breeding stock is slaughtered for meat. Existing livestock--mostly sheep, goats and camels --have chewed up all the food cover in sight, and the ecological balance has been so savaged that experts say recovery of the land's food-generating potential may be as much as 30 years away.

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