Agreat lake stretches across the desert, shimmering enticingly. Unfortunately, it is a mirage. The Afar region of Ethiopia, perhaps the hottest inhabited place on earth, is even drier than usual this year, and the people who live there have run out of food. Their beloved cows lie dead and dying in the hot sand. Many of the carcasses are so fresh that the storks and hyenas have not yet had time to peck or chew them clean. In much of eastern, southern and northern Ethiopia, the rains have been rotten this year. In all, 5.9m of Ethiopia's 65m people need food aid or other assistance, according to the World Food Programme. The food shortage is not as terrible as the one in southern Africa. Nor is it as disastrous as the famine Ethiopia suffered in the mid-1980s. Ethiopia's current government is not indifferent to human suffering in the way its old Marxist dictatorship was, or Zimbabwe's government now is.
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