Word: drought
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...consisting of some 100 observers from two dozen universities and other institutions, will be divided into two camps, on opposite sides of Africa. The smaller group will set up its instruments in Mauritania, where the hot dry air should offer good viewing. But because Mauritania has experienced a severe drought for the past few years, sudden winds could blow up obscuring clouds of dust particles. Scientists are hedging their bets by establishing another camp on Kenya's Lake Rudolf, near Loiyengalani. Even more primitive than some of the sites in Mauritania, the village is accessible only by small planes...
Hardest hit is Mali, a landlocked country where livestock are considered more precious than money. There, at least 1,000,000 of the nation's estimated 5,000,000 cattle have perished in the worst drought in memory...
Even in the best of years, much of sub-Saharan Africa is stalked by the grim specter of famine. This year has been one of the worst. A 40-month drought has left the area brown and blistered. Crops have failed; millions of cattle have died. Thousands of farmers are eating seed grains to stave off starvation, thus ensuring that there will be insufficient food from future harvests. In lands where suicide is rare, starving nomads, after losing their herds, have killed themselves in desperation...
...drought has caused even greater disruption in Upper Volta, where a southward migration of more than a million people is under way. Nomads are pouring into Ivory Coast and Ghana in a search for grazing lands. Their starving animals are poaching on cropland tended by subsistence farmers. The result has been a number of pitched battles, similar to those between cattlemen and sodbusters in America's Old West...
...major reason for the drought is man's neglect of the land. Goats and camels have denuded millions of acres of savanna. In order to feed their animals, herdsmen cut off the tops of trees, halting their growth. Weather experts believe that this systematic stripping of land has altered the climate and brought about an unmistakable decline in the rainfall. As a result, the Sahara is spreading south at a rate of more than half a mile each year...