Word: sahara
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Terrible Mistakes. In Africa, a five-year drought has parched the 2,600 mile-long "savannah belt," just south of the Sahara Desert. As a result, large portions of six African nations-Senegal, Mauritania, Upper Volta, Mali, Chad and Niger-now subsist mainly on international contributions of food (TIME, Sept. 3). Although man cannot be blamed for the lack of rain, a recent study by the U.S. Agency for International Development reports that the Africans' efforts to gain a better living from the potentially productive land have made a bad situation much worse...
...savannah grass has been replaced by seasonal crops, and available ground water has been squandered. Most damaging of all, the inhabitants have allowed their huge herds of livestock to denude the land through overgrazing. These practices, combined with the drought, have killed off the natural vegetation and allowed the Sahara to creep southward-in some places, says AID, by "as much as 30 miles a year...
Three as yet unselected Harvard students will travel to sub-Sahara Africa in January to assist Mali tribesmen in building an adequate and reliable water supply system...
...Mali and Senegal. Their antiquated railroad networks cannot move grain quickly enough into the interior. The ongoing airlift offers the most plausible solution, but there are not enough aircraft. The result is that while mass famine has been averted over a 2,600-mi. strip stretching across the southern Sahara, many of the area's 24 million people are still seriously short of food. Severe malnutrition seems inevitable, and with it an increase in disease and a lowering of the average life span...
...wrong. I hadn't eaten in about 24 hours and felt sort of sick. Three boxes of popcorn didn't help. The theatre didn't pass out any blankets at the door either. I wish they had 'cause the air conditioners were churning it up like they thought the Sahara desert was due to blow in through the door any minute. I had to leave before the end of the show. They wouldn't let me smoke cigarettes...