Word: sahel
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...Droughts and famines were reported as early as 253 B.C. In the great drought of 1888, a third of the population is said to have died from malnourishment and disease. This latest calamity is part of a 30-year pattern that has seen the rains repeatedly fail along the Sahel, the wide swath of land that cuts Africa in half just below the Sahara. After the 1984-85 drought, which killed an estimated 2 million people in Africa, there was a brief period of uncommon optimism in Addis Ababa. In 1985 and 1986 the rains were good for the first...
...tragedy that afflicts Ethiopia also plagues much of Africa. The belt of privation cuts a ragged T through the continent. The horizontal bar is made up of the famine-prone nations of the Sahel; the vertical bar extends from the Sudan down through Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique and into tiny Lesotho. To the west of this scythe of hunger lie Zaire and Angola...
...Saharan Africa is burdened with half the world's 10 million refugees, partly as a result of the drought that has held the Sahel region in its arid grip for more than a decade. As nomadic herdsmen wander thousands of miles in search of food and water, some 14 million acres of potentially productive grasslands are destroyed each year by their livestock. At least 20% of the continent is desert; experts believe that the process of "desertification" could encompass 45% of Africa in 50 years if current patterns of land use are allowed to continue. Famine and pestilence plague...
...chance in life." The world's distribution of wealth, he pointed out, depends almost as much on luck as on energy, foresight and skill. It is only the luck of the world if one is born in the country club district of Kansas City instead of the Sahel or Bangladesh. It is the sad luck of things for a Colorado oil millionaire if his youngest child, by mishaps of the psyche, turns out to harbor some fetid, lovesick ambition to kill the President...
Chad's African neighbors were even less sanguine about Gaddafi's invasion. Said Senegal's daily Le Soleil, summing up a common view: "All Africa should be concerned. Chad could be the first link in a United States of the Sahel sought by Libya...