The worst drought conditions in Syria in 26 years caused a 4,000-year-old spring to run dry over the weekend. The Fieji spring and the Barada river have been supplying the country with its drinking water for more than 4,000 years. However, rainfall registered at Fieji dropped to a meager 279 mm in April from 450 mm during the same period last year -- essentially drying up, according to government officials. Officials have called for a drastic water-rationing plan, which includes cutting the use of water by six hours each day.

Less than a year ago, the Delta and Pine Land Company, a U.S. cotton seed firm, announced it had received a joint patent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on a technique that genetically disables the capacity for plants to produce seeds that will germinate.

Since the announcement, critics have been predicting that the technology will be used to control the country's food supply. Not only that, they say, but in a worst-case scenario, the technology could be used as a weapon to control elements of the population who may resist such concepts as world government.

The terminator technology incorporates a method of biogenetic engineering that turns off the reproductive processes of plants so that the seed produced by the plant is sterile. Farmers who use this seed would not be able to collect seed from their own crop for the following year's planting, and would be forced to buy new seed every season.

So far, the method has only proven effective for tobacco and cotton. However, the patent covers all crops, and Delta is planning to develop the technology for a much broader range of crops after the year 2000.

Michael T. Seigel, SVD, writing for a Rome-based Catholic theologian group, is worried about the economic impact the technology will have on both domestic and Third World farmers if they are forced to purchase new seed annually. In the Third World, he said, "poor farmers grow 15 percent to 20 percent of the world's food, and they directly feed at least 1.4 billion people--100 million in Latin America, 300 million in Africa, and 1 billion in Asia. These farmers continue to produce food in this way, saving the seed from their best plants every year to plant the following season."

"The sole purpose of this 'terminator' technology is market control," he wrote. "It adds nothing of value to the seed. Its sole purpose is to make farmers ever more dependent on the seed companies. In fact, it is a biological form of built-in obsolescence."

Clearly, some have contemplated the kind of power that could be wielded with the total control of a society's food source. Bertrand Russell described how food could be used to control entire populations in his 1953 book, The Impact of Science on Society. He wrote, "A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government…. This authority should deal out the world's food to the various nations in proportion to their population at the time of the establishment of the authority. If any nation subsequently increased its population, it should not on that account receive any more food."

LUGUO, China—At a bend in the Tumen River, a stooped North Korean man, with the face of an 80-year-old and the body of a sickly boy, stumbled down an icy road on the Chinese side of the border. In broad daylight, he risked capture, deportation by China's border police and beatings.

"I don't care anymore," said Kim Guang Il, 20, a cement factory worker who had walked 60 snowy miles over seven days from the North Korean port of Chongjin, wearing a flax sack for a scarf, rags for socks and gloves, and shoes without laces. "If I stayed hiding in the snow, I was going to die. If I stayed in North Korea, I was going to die. I am too cold. And I am starving."

His parents, he said, were dead from disease. A brother had disappeared in the all-consuming search for food. A friend had succumbed to hunger and cold as they struggled to reach China.

Interviews with refugees and private aid officials on China's border with North Korea paint a stark picture of developments inside the isolated country where some reports say that a famine may have killed as many as 2 million people since the mid-1990s.

Refugees described a grotesque landscape of crumbling families, homes without electricity or heat, and towns and villages where promised foreign food aid did not arrive or was reserved for ruling party elites, whose neighbors survived on twigs, leaves, cornstalks and frogs.

Even the discipline of the North Korean army is collapsing. Many refugees reported that soldiers have taken to raiding markets, stealing food at gunpoint. "The government is still in control," said Kim Jil, 27, from near Pyongyang, "but the whole society has no goal anymore. The common people are trying to get food. The officials are getting more food. The children? They spend all day in the train station stealing food and trying to keep warm. I had a neighbor who died early last year. The authorities spent time identifying him and notifying his family. Now they don't even bother identifying people anymore."

Finance Minister Meir Sheetrit and Agriculture Minister Rafael Eitan will officially declare a drought on April 15, enabling the government to compensate farmers for their financial losses. The "Supreme Drought Committee," made up of officials from the agriculture and finance ministries, is scheduled to visit the fields Monday to make a final decision as to which areas were afflicted by the drought, the borders of the affliction, and the extent of damage to each area and crop. The committee's recommendations will then be submitted to the finance and agriculture ministers.

Eitan said Saturday that 1999 was set to be the worst year for Israeli agriculture in 60 years, possibly leading to a complete change in the makeup of local agriculture and its use of water. "As of this year, farmers are expected to shift to using purified sewage water, freeing more fresh water for home use," Eitan said. Yossi Dror, Secretary of the Union of Field Crop Workers, said that he estimated some 600,000-700,000 dunams (150,000-175,000 acres) had been seriously affected by the drought.

Afflicted areas are those in which less than 300 millimeters of rain fell all winter, the minimum amount of rain needed to cover production costs. Less than 100 mm of rain fell in the Western Galilee; some 140 mm in the Negba-Kiryat Gat area; and some 200 mm in the eastern Jezreel Valley.

China's worst drought since the 1980s has left 19 million people short of drinking water and affected 21 1/2 million acres of farmland, AP reported. Parts of China have had "scant rainfall'' since September, the Xinhua News Agency quoted Zhao Guangfa, an official from the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, as saying. Rainfall at or near record lows has depleted reservoirs and could hurt summer crops in Sichuan province in the west, Guangxi in the south, Gansu in the northwest and Guangdong in the southeast, state media said. Hardest-hit so far is the northeast, where Shandong and Henan provinces produce about half of China's winter wheat.

The UN's food aid agency sounded the alarm for 1999 after an upsurge of emergencies, including wars and weather disasters in 1998.

"Forecasts show there will likely be an increase in the number of countries suffering emergencies and the number of people needing humanitarian assistance," World Food Program (EWFP) Executive Director Catherine Bertini said. "We have to enter 1999 with the understanding that we may face an increased threat of famine, malnutrition and endemic hunger," she said in a statement.

Bertini said climate catastrophes like Hurricane Mitch--Central America's worst natural disaster for 200 years--economic collapses in Indonesia and Russia, resumption of civil wars in Kosovo and Angola and steady, long-term conflicts such as that in southern Sudan had been driving up hunger levels.

The Rome-based agency said a new trend prompting food insecurity had emerged--the economic emergency. In Indonesia, for example, it said the sudden financial crisis spawned massive shortages of food and medicine and "transformed middle-class citizens into a new population of hungry poor."

Bertini said that every day more than 800 million people in the world were chronically undernourished because of poverty, but that the face of hunger was changing and governments must put food relief at the top of their agenda for 1999.

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Articles on this Page     Syria hit by severest drought in 26 years     Seed technology: Feast or famine?     Portrait of a famine     Israel to declare drought next month     China suffering worst drought; 19 million lack water     UN's food aid agency warns 1999 outlook bleak

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