EIGHT YEARS OF DROUGHT

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28180, 19 January 1957, Page 6

EIGHT YEARS OF DROUGHT

America’s Southern States Stricken

RIO GRANDE NOW DRY RIVERBED

(Associated Newspapers Feature Services) NEW YORK. January 12. America, like Australia, is prone to the paradox of both floods and droughts. Just now great tracts of America’s southwest are drying up into uselessness in the most heartbreaking drought in the recorded history of the country. The drought is now in its eighth terrible year and is worse and more extensive than the “big dry up” that produced the Dust Bowl of the ’thirties.

This drought, like all droughts, has caused more than economic disaster. It has caused acute human suffering, and even tragedy, for tens of thousands of hardworking people. So grave is the problem that President Eisenhower has undertaken a three-day air tour of the worst-hit States to see what new help his Government can provide. From his plane, the President is seeing unbroken stretches of land that are burnt and brown, caked and cracked, lifeless and barren, and pockmarked with dried-out waterholes.

This ghastly drought area stretches across eight States: from the west, from Colorado in the north to Texas and the Rio Grande in the south.

“Soil Ready to Blow” The Department of Agriculture says that 2.000.000 acres have al-, ready been ruined and that another 29,000,000 acres are “ready to blow” with the first stiff wind. Some experts believe that even if rain comes now it will be 20 years before the soil recovers and becomes fully productive again. Typical drought conditions were seen by this correspondent while travelling through New Mexico last year. Hour after hour, as the train raced through the dust haze, there was nothing to see but utterly desolate country, its | stark barrenness broken only by I an occasional dead tree.

The once picturesque Rio Grande had, in this State. been reduced to a dry, sandy riverbed.

Further south in Texas, where everything happens on a giant scale, drought conditions are even worse; 235 of the State’s 254 counties have been declared “disaster areas.” which means that their farmers and ranches are eligible to buy feed and roughage for stock at cut rates. The drought is so severe and so prolonged that its effects are felt in the towns and cities as well as in the country. The modern and booming city of Dallas is drawing emergency water from the Red river, but it is so salty that many residents buy bottled drinking water. Many courageous ranchers and farmers are trying to “stick it out” in the stubborn hope that rain will come before it is too late. Others, perhaps wiser, have sold out. Effect on Jobs But probably the worst sufferers have been the cowhands and the farmhands, particularly the negroes and the Mexicans. Many farmers and ranchers can no longer afford farmhands and cowhands: also, in many cases, there is little work for them to do. As a result labourers have been moving to the cities at the rate of 300.000 a year, swelling the unskilled labour market and depressing the already low wage scales.

Today more than 100.000 people in the oil-rich. State of Texas are receiving Government “relief” food supplies.

This drought-inflicted poverty has hurt business, too, although few talk about it because “all this drought talk only hurts business more.”

Several grandiose, droughtpreventing plans have been prepared, including the suggestion that a canal be built right across Texas to link all major rivers into a giant water-conservation plan.