7/31/07 Celia Dugger, NY Times.

A woman let water flow into her sorghum plot, part of an American-financed irrigation project in northwestern Kenya. Families were promised corn for their work, but it never arrived. More Photos >

Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes.

Ikai Moru, 19, still recalls the hunger that gnawed at her and her mother as they chopped down thorny acacia trees on their tiny plot, hoping one day to reap a bountiful harvest from the parched earth. She watched her mother grow thinner and paler, and finally sicken and die.

"My mother was a very hard worker," Ms. Moru offered in a brief epitaph.

Through sheer grit, the 2,000 families finished the irrigation system last year and are successfully farming. But long-term projects to help Africa's rural poor feed themselves are chronically underfinanced, charities say.

Across Africa, the United States is more likely to give people a fish -- caught in America -- that feeds them for a day than to teach them to fish for themselves. Since last year, for example, the United States has donated $136 million worth of American food to feed the hungry in Kenya, but spent $36 million on agricultural projects to help Kenyan farmers grow and earn more.

And even that small budget for long-term projects in Kenya is expected to dwindle. The United States Agency for International Development, known as Usaid, in seeking to concentrate scarce resources, has dropped Kenya from the list of countries eligible for undertakings like the irrigation project here.

Such efforts are dwarfed by the epic scale of the need. Viewed from a prop plane buzzing like a mosquito overhead, the irrigated land here shimmers as a tiny oasis in a vast, dun-colored landscape.

With the guidance of the Christian charity World Vision, which implemented the project, the families hacked an irrigation system from the barren landscape with machetes, hoes and shovels, clearing 1,000 acres and digging 99 miles of canals along the Kerio River.

Ms. Moru will soon be feeding her four younger brothers and sisters with an abundance of sorghum and corn harvested from their half-acre farm, fulfilling her mother's dream.

The success is noteworthy, but the families' sacrifices also illustrate the risks of an American food aid system that is designed to benefit domestic agribusiness and shipping interests and enmeshed in an intricate framework of farm subsidies.

Members of Congress who favor the current system say the support of influential commercial groups is needed to sustain political support for food aid. They warn that ill-timed purchases of food in Africa in times of scarcity could send food prices higher, harming poor consumers.

But critics in Congress contend that the United States could feed far more people more quickly if it could buy surplus food in Africa. It might also help boost the incomes of African farmers, by providing a market for their crops, they say.

The Bush administration is now trying to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies.

The Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid.

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Corn That Never Came

Even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee's version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members,` "They're still of the mode that this should be American products we're using our tax dollars to provide them."

Mr. Peterson's district got $367 million in corn subsidies in 2005, according to government data analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization.

Even without the American corn that was supposed to keep them going, the families here were determined to grasp their once-in-a-lifetime chance at fertile plots of farmland. Ms. Moru, 14 years old when construction began, recalled how she and her widowed mother had taken on the acacia trees together. They lopped off branches barbed with thorns, burned the trunks and uprooted the stumps.

"It was the heaviest work we had ever done, but we had no choice," Ms. Moru said. "It was the only way to get land to plow."

Their success was all the more extraordinary given this desiccated region's history as a graveyard for well-intended foreign aid efforts to help the Turkana tribe, mostly nomadic herders, escape punishing cycles of drought, hunger and death.

The participants themselves credit a man who gave them fortitude when they faltered: Daniel Mwebi, a Kenyan engineer who managed the project here for World Vision.

From 1992 to 2004, he lived for much of each year in this remote place, far from his wife and children. He said he had been determined to avoid the mistakes of earlier aid projects that relied on heavy earth-moving equipment and diesel-run pumps that required costly fuel, expertise and maintenance.

So he designed a very basic system and trained the Turkana in the masonry, carpentry and welding skills they needed to keep it running. The earthen irrigation systems -- built in two United States-financed projects -- are powered only by gravity and the sweat of the local people.

What Mr. Mwebi could not have anticipated, however, was how the workings of the American food aid system would deeply complicate that plan, which Usaid financed for $4 million over five years.

When it came to tiding the families over with American corn, the Kenyan government objected, said Simon Nyabwengi, then World Vision's Nairobi-based manager of the Turkana project. "They offered a very reasonable option," he said. "They said we appreciate the project, it's a good project, but we don't want you to bring in maize."

William Hammink, who heads the office of Food for Peace at Usaid, confirmed that the corn was never delivered because the United States was prohibited from buying it in Kenya or paying duties on imports.

"We kept waiting," said Aemun Imong, a 32-year-old mother of four. "They told us, 'Food is coming, food is coming.' But we saw it wasn't coming."

The lack of food was particularly dire for children under age 5. World Vision surveys documented that the proportion of them stunted by malnutrition rose to about a third in 2004, from about a fifth when construction began in 2002.

The five people who died were Ms. Moru's mother, another woman and three children, according to Mr. Lokolonyoi, who said he reported the deaths to district authorities.

Mr. Hammink of Usaid said he did not know what caused the worsening of malnutrition, though he said that provision of corn to the families would most likely have lessened it.

The United Nations World Food Program, with contributions from other nations, was able to obtain 75 percent more corn to feed Africa's hungry from 2001 to 2005 by purchasing it in Kenya, Zambia and Uganda, rather than shipping it from the United States, Michigan State researchers found.

As the building stretched over years, a portion of the promised beans and vegetable oil from the United States was delivered in 2004, Mr. Mwebi said. Some corn bought in Kenya with private money also came. But it was too late to avert the hunger of the early years.

By 2005, the families each had a half-acre of cleared land to farm. They grew enough food to donate almost 14,000 pounds for the needy still around them, said Hosea Lotir, who heads the local water users' association.

As they settled down to farm instead of wandering with their animals, the number of children in the Lokwii primary school more than doubled, to 857 -- and would have doubled again if it had not closed its admissions, school officials said.

The families here continue to nurture their verdant green spots of progress. Nearby villages are clamoring for irrigation projects of their own, but American officials say they do not expect to have the money to finance them.

As the sun neared its zenith one recent morning, the main canal in Morulem -- the site of the first irrigation project -- was a cauldron of flailing hoes and shovels. Women glistening with sweat gouged out tons of silt to clear a clogged channel.

On a later shift, it was the men's turn, and women squatting on the banks hectored them. Don't just shovel at the sides of the canal, they yelled, dig out the middle of it. That's the hard part!

"I know what I'm doing," Julius Edukon barked back. "I don't need your advice."

Arupe Eoto, a withered old woman, sought to mollify him with praise and a nod to the tribe's sternest taskmaster. "You really seem to know what you're doing," she told him. "The hunger has taught you well."

Iriba, Chad - With Darfur refugee women waiting up to two days for their chance to fill buckets at a communal water point, it's only a matter of time before bickering turns into a full-fledged fight.

In the 115-degree F. heat of the Touloum refugee camp, just across Sudan's border in eastern Chad, the stakes are high. Refugees receive only 4.5 liters, on average, per family member - just enough for drinking and cooking. A family that misses its day or gets shoved aside at the water pump may not survive.

On this day, a younger woman has been caught cutting in line. She and an older woman wrestle each other to the ground.

"I have been waiting here two days for my turn, and if the water finishes I will have to ask for water from other people," says Khadija Musa, the elderly woman. "Sometimes I have to borrow water to cook. Our clothes are filthy, we cannot wash without water." She rubs her shoulder and sighs. "The only thing left is to die."

Competition for water - in refugee camps, between farmers and herders, and between countries - has long sparked conflict in the arid region and forms one of the main causes of the war in Sudan's Darfur region. But the trouble is only beginning, as it becomes clear that dramatic climate change will have its sharpest effects in Africa, leading to rising hardship, massive population displacement, and, in some cases, all-out war.

Yet a growing number of aid workers here say that the same issue that pits communities against each other can also bring them together. Solving common problems - improving access to water for farmers and herders alike - could be the first step toward reconciliation, and lasting peace.

"In a way, water can be a divider or it can bring people together," says Caroline Saint-Mleux, head of Care International's office in Iriba, Chad, which manages two refugee camps in the Iriba area.

"Is [water] the only cause of the problem?" she asks. "Obviously, everyone knows it's a very complex conflict. But at the same time, you can use [water] to bring the communities back together.... You have to have [the warring parties] talk about a common need, and after that you might have them talk about something else that would start giving other solutions to the conflict."

Just what set off the conflict in Darfur - and subsequent spillover conflicts here in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic - remains a topic of vigorous debate. In Darfur, local perceptions of neglect by the Sudanese government led members of the non-Arabic speaking Fur and Zaghawa tribes to take up arms in protest in 2003.

The government, having few soldiers on the ground, turned to nomadic Arab tribes, allegedly arming them and promising them whatever property they could take from the rebellious black tribes.

UN agencies estimate that at least 200,000 civilians were killed in the following several years, with 2.5 million forced from their homes into refugee camps.

But many experts say that the underlying tensions between mostly nomadic Arabs and sedentary black farmers - both of whom are Muslim - is their centuries-long competition for water and land, a competition that has been exacerbated by decades of drought. Lake Chad, which forms part of the border between Chad, Nigeria, and Niger, has dropped to 10 percent of its original size.

Sudanese and Chadian officials estimate that rainfall has dropped nearly 40 percent over the past 50 years. Less rain trickles into underground aquifers, and water tables have been dropping.

Arab nomads, both in Chad and Darfur, must now take their herds of camels, goats, donkeys, and sheep farther and farther south to the wetter zones occupied by black farmers to find grazing pasture.

And as water becomes more scarce, these nomads are finding the old open pastures fenced off, the water wells available only for a fee. Age-old agreements between nomads and farmers are being rewritten.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a war began in Darfur. Khartoum merely supplied the arms to take the fighting to a genocidal scale.

A growing number of Western officials see the Darfur conflict as much larger and more complex than the simple story of genocide of black tribes by Arab militias.

British Home Secretary John Reid pointed to global warming as a key factor behind the conflict in Darfur. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur," he said. "We should see this as a warning sign."

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon also joined the climate-change bandwagon, writing in a Washington Post opinion page column, "The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

Activists in the Save Darfur Coalition and others say the climate-change argument is an attempt to absolve Sudan's government of its well-documented recruiting, arming, and directing of Arab janjaweed militias against black villages.

Khartoum has long minimized its own role in the fighting, calling Darfur "a local conflict." It has also minimized the death toll, citing only 9,000 deaths compared with UN estimates of 200,000.

In the refugee camps scattered across the parched deserts of Eastern Chad, where refugees receive only 4.5 to 10 liters of water a day and where refugee women are often beaten or raped when they venture into local communities in search of firewood or water from local wells, climate change is not a theoretical issue. It is a crushing fact of life.

Emmanuel Uwurukundo, head of the field office of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Iriba, says that water has now become the chief concern of aid organizations, and a growing source of tension between the local population and Sudanese refugees.

"It's a big competition for water; it's a big competition of firewood in the zone; it's a big competition of raising land in the zone, and it's not very easy for us," he says.

The problem is even more stark up north in the town of Bahai, says Tim Burroughs, the environmental health officer for International Rescue Committee, which runs a refugee camp for 26,000 Darfuris in the area.

"Bahai is a terrible place for a camp," says Mr. Burroughs. "It's where the Sahara begins. There are plenty of dunes, you see houses overtaken by sand, you see villages abandoned."

In 50 years, Bahai will no longer be able to sustain life, he says, but at present, "there's no where else to put the refugees," because of language and local prejudice. The local people of Bahai speak Zaghawa, and so do the refugees. Further south, where there is more water, Zaghawas are the unwelcome minority.

Recent good news from Darfur, about a newly discovered deep-underground aquifer containing enough water to fill Lake Erie, may provide some temporary relief from the effects of climate change, as scientists hope to start drilling wells as soon as possible. But water experts say that aquifers and borewells only delay the inevitable fact - that desertification will eventually dry out the land, and push people and their animals further and further south.

"It's not just bringing water to people that matters, we also have to think of their animals," says Burroughs.

"You have to provide fodder, you need to provide feeding areas and pastureland. If there is not enough for the animals to eat, then there is no reason for people to be there, and they are going to move south."

And herders moving into areas inhabited by farmers is what has sparked many of the clashes to date.

Meanwhile, the thankless task of providing water for the 220,000 refugees - and increasingly to local communities - falls on the shoulders of the UNHCR, which oversees the running of a dozen camps as well as the half dozen sites for 120,000 Chadians displaced by a civil conflict that erupted last year in Eastern Chad.

The UN, together with other donors such as USAID, is studying possibilities for creating more sustainable water sources for the growing populations of Eastern Chad, building catchment dams to hold onto the season rains that flow through dry river beds called wadis. They are also conducting seismic mapping tests to find likely sources of deep underground aquifers.

Gabriel Salas leads a UNHCR-funded team with much more immediate goals: finding enough water to get refugees through the dry season. The place where he has found water is underneath these wadis in vast canyons carved out of sandstone by more permanent rivers from a geological period when the Sahel was a much wetter place.

Now filled with sand, these underground canyons are ideal aquifers for storing water.

It was Salas who dug a bore well in a wadi, 34 kilometers from Abéché, that supplies water for the 80,000 people of Abéché. "All the water for this town comes from one bore well, 34 kilometers from here," he says. "What does that tell you? In a radius of 34 kilometers, you cannot find groundwater unless you go to a wadi."

Salas, as a geologist, doesn't see the problem of global warming as a recent phenomenon, but as something that has been going on for thousands of years. "The attack of Rome by Hannibal happened 2,400 years ago, and he took elephants from Carthage and marched them toward Rome. Now, the fact that you had elephants in the North of Africa shows that there has been climate change and that desertification has been taking place for a long time." If there is one obstacle preventing a longer-term solution to the problem of water in Eastern Chad and Darfur, i's money. The longer that a conflict remains unresolved, and the longer that refugees stay in foreign lands, the harder it is for UN agencies, such as the UNHCR, and relief agencies, like Care and Oxfam, to raise money for their relief. Longer-term development projects, such as the provision of water for citizens, are the responsibility of governments, where World Bank and UN Development Program funded projects can take years and decades to design and put into place.

This means that local people and Sudanese refugees will continue to see each other as rivals in the constant hunt for water.

At a public well on the outskirts of Iriba, a dozen or so local men and children drop buckets 50 feet and hit mud. A lucky few managed to scrape the last few gallons off of the floor. The current rate for 140 liters is about $5. This is less than half of the amount of water the average American uses in a day (300 to 375 liters, or 80 to 100 gallons, according to the US Geological Service.)

"We have had more than five years with not much rain," says Abakar Abdullah Djibrine, a water seller at the well. "Before there was water, but now there is no water, and water is very expensive. Yes, people are angry. Life is too difficult without water."

Why a Rwandan survivor runs a Chad refugee camp

At the UNHCR compound near the Darfur border, you find the young and middle-aged, European and African and Chadian. And then there is their chief, Emmanuel Uwurukundo, a Rwandan Tutsi from Kigali. In charge of three camps with a total population of 57,000, Emmanuel is part mayor, part peacemaker, and at the end of the day, a good-time Charlie with an infectious laugh.

Mr. Uwurukundo has what many would consider an impossible job. Directly responsible for three camps full of people who have lost so much, and who even now receive precious little - 5 to 10 liters of water a day, on average, a sack of wheat flour every two weeks, a can of cooking oil, a plastic sheet for cover, and blankets. Uwurukundo doesn't often get gushes of gratitude. On the week we were there, he was chased from the camp at Am Nabak after a swarm of angry women began to pelt him and his colleagues with stones for not providing enough plastic sheeting.

What makes a man like this leave a country that itself has emerged from an ethnic genocide only a few years ago to come to a conflict with many of the same characteristics?

"I was in Kigali during the genocide, hiding," he says. His wife and children, his mother-in-law, and sister-in-law still live in Kigali. Everyone else he had ever known and loved was murdered in what must have been the bloodiest month in human history.

"When you are a survivor of something like this, you have two choices," he says. "Either you come to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and for all intents and purposes, you are dead to the world, without hope. Or you think, if I am still alive, there must be a reason for it. There must be something that I can do with my experiences to make things better."

One doesn't have to undergo personal tragedies such as Uwurukundo's in order to make a difference in people's lives. But a person like Uwurukundo has a tendency to attract like-minded people, and they tend to bring out the better qualities of those around them. It was Uwurukundo's UNHCR team who put us in touch with a Chadian farmer who had given plots of his land to Sudanese refugees to farm ("Flooded with refugees, a farmer shares land," in the July 12 issue of the Monitor).

Uwurukundo recalled his own lengthy conversations with the farmer, Al-Hajj Ali Saboor Bakit. Mr. Bakit had been a refugee himself, Uwurukundo says, forced into a more peaceful Darfur when Chad itself was having a violent anti-government rebellion. Now that Darfuris are flooding across the border into a relatively peaceful Chad, Bakit could identify with the losses of the Darfuris who have now flooded Chad's sparse desert.

It was clear that Uwurukundo could see a part of himself in Bakit as well. The two men - both Africans, but one an illiterate Muslim, the other a highly educated Christian - had found common experiences of hardship and a similar outlook of what to do with their experiences.

Outsiders have a disturbing tendency of portraying Africa as a passive place, where people blame the outside world - from the former colonial rulers to the World Bank - for their problems. But these two are not quitters or blamers. They knew they could make a difference.

"My object is to get the local community and the refugees together to see how they can share traditional wells and keep things together," says Uwurukundo. He realizes that his job is to put himself out of a job, to help the refugees reach a point where they can look after themselves.

"It's a matter of dignity, a feeling that they are not begging," says Uwurukundo. "If you give 100 percent assistance to refugees, you create a dependent state, and when it comes time to repatriate them, you'll have trouble. It's only once they are capable of contributing to their own well-being that they will feel better about themselves."

A decade ago, geologists found signs that one of Africa's least-known countries, the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Principe, might hold a king's ransom in oil.

A bicyclist rides near a hotel under construction in São Tomé, which is trying to ensure that its residents benefit from an anticipated oil boom.

The first drop of oil has yet to be produced. But these days, little São Tomé may have attracted ample supplies of something else, federal investigators suspect -- oil-related corruption.

All of this might not seem unusual in Africa, where oil and corruption often go hand in hand. However, São Tomé, a former Portuguese colony off the coast of Nigeria, was supposed to be different. In recent years, a steady stream of activists like the Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs have gone there to try to make sure that any energy boom would benefit its 150,000 people, rather than politicians and companies.

"Oil can be a blessing or a bane for a country," Mr. Sachs said. "The theory was to help São Tomé avoid the resource curse."

Things, however, have not quite worked out that way.

The recent Justice Department indictment of William J. Jefferson, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana, contends, for example, that he solicited a bribe from a company seeking his help with an oil-related dispute involving São Tomé.

Separately, federal authorities are investigating a small Houston-based company whose only assets are large holdings in São Tomé to determine if it bribed the country's officials. On another front, a powerful Nigerian businessman who is the chairman of the Houston company, ERHC Energy, is under investigation in his country for possible insider oil dealings.

All those involved -- Mr. Jefferson, ERHC, and that company's chairman, Emeka Offor -- deny that they did anything wrong.

Still, the experience of São Tomé, a poor country that supports itself by selling cocoa and commemorative stamps featuring celebrities like Elvis Presley and Brigitte Bardot, shows how just the hint of oil can set off a scramble for riches. Along with Mr. Sachs, those who sought to help included George Soros, the billionaire turned philanthropist, and a high-powered Washington lawyer, Gregory B. Craig, who defended President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

"In West Africa, the scent of oil alone may be enough" to produce corruption, said Joseph C. Bell, another Washington lawyer who has traveled to São Tomé to work on new oil laws.

At the center of the São Tomé story stands ERHC, a tiny company whose ranks have included a collection of characters and politically connected entrepreneurs like Mr. Offor. According to a 2005 report by the attorney general of São Tomé, Mr. Offor is one of the largest donors to Nigeria's ruling political party and a close ally of Olusegun Obasanjo, who until recently was Nigeria's president.

São Tomé's unusual journey through the backwaters of the oil industry traces back to the mid-1990s, when ERHC arrived there. Large underwater oil deposits had been found nearby, off the coast of Nigeria, and ERHC believed that the tiny island might be the next big prize in west Africa.

At that time, the Texas company was owned by some wildcatters and an enterprising Florida businesswoman named Noreen Wilson. Over the years, she has been involved with several penny stock companies including a short-lived enterprise called Pizza Group Inc.

In 1997, Ms. Wilson signed a $5 million contract that gave ERHC, which was then known as the Environmental Remediation Holding Corporation, exploration rights in São Tomé for 25 years. The contract was soon described by some outside experts as extremely lopsided.

Soon afterward, Ms. Wilson resigned from ERHC during an investigation of the company by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But she appeared to retain an interest in the island's future; in 2001, for instance, she apparently reached out to Mr. Jefferson for help there, his indictment suggests. At that time, São Tomé's new president was threatening to break a number of oil-related deals, including ERHC's.

Ms. Wilson, who declined through her lawyer, Joseph A. Artabane, to be interviewed for this article, is not named in that indictment. But the filing describes how two unnamed people, a business executive and a lobbyist, went to see Mr. Jefferson about an oil-related dispute on São Tomé. In return for a promise of help, Mr. Jefferson demanded that a family member receive benefit, a demand that was met, the indictment states.

Mr. Artabane, who said that Ms. Wilson testified before the Jefferson grand jury, declined to confirm that she was the executive involved, but he did not dispute it either. The lobbyist involved was James P. Creaghan, according to his lawyer, E. Barton Conradi, who said his client has cooperated throughout with authorities. Mr. Creaghan worked with Ms. Wilson during that time. (Neither of them has been accused of wrongdoing.)

Meanwhile, wheels were already spinning in São Tomé when activists like Mr. Sachs, the economist, arrived. Their mission: To prevent it from following in footsteps of other African countries where corruption and waste typically follow oil. In Nigeria, the continent's largest producer, most people live on less than $2 a day while politicians have stolen or squandered billions.

Initially, hopes were high. Soon after his election as president, Fradique de Menezes, a cocoa plantation owner, vowed that his country would be different. And he turned for help to outsiders like Mr. Craig, the Washington lawyer who represented President Clinton during his impeachment trial.

But Mr. Craig, like others who followed him, found himself facing some powerful adversaries: Nigeria and Mr. Offor. In 2001, Nigeria had jumped in the picture when it signed an agreement with São Tomé to share oil revenues from waters between the two nations. Mr. Offor, the ally of Nigeria's president, bought ERHC, which was then near bankruptcy, just a few days before that agreement was signed.

Mr. Craig said that while he successfully renegotiated contracts with other oil companies in São Tomé, Mr. Offor would not budge. "The metaphor of David versus Goliath doesn't quite capture the relation between São Tomé and Nigeria," he said. "It's more like an ant."

In time, ERHC did agree to some changes in its contract, but the company retained extremely favorable terms, including the right to choose among the best oil blocks without paying the type of special one-time fee that governments typically demanded.

Mr. de Menezes continued to seek assistance; in 2003, for instance, he reached out to Mr. Sachs.

"He called and said, 'Look we've found some oil and the sharks are swimming around us now, and I'd like some help to manage this properly,' " Mr. Sachs recalled in a recent interview.

As part of that effort, a Columbia University team and others helped draft a new oil law that contained safeguards to make sure São Tomé spent its oil-related revenue properly. The team then traveled around the country, holding meetings on cocoa plantations and in churches, where they explained to residents how the new statute would protect their interests.

"Imagine what would happen if there was a big flood that hit us," stated a cartoon-like booklet that they handed out to residents. "The oil law creates a dam."

By late 2005, however, a report by the attorney general of São Tomé delivered a dose of reality. Among other things, it found that some companies that won blocs in the zone controlled jointly by São Tomé and its neighbor were headed by Nigerian businessmen with political ties but no oil experience.

The bidding process "was subject to serious procedural deficiencies and political manipulation," the report concluded. In addition, the report found some large multinational oil companies were so suspicious of ERHC that they decided not to bid and added that ERHC "may have made improper payments to government officials."

ERHC has disputed those findings and said in a statement that it received its rights legitimately and that it has also made numerous concessions to São Tomé.

"We care about perceptions of ERHC Energy and we have been working to fully understand any concerns expressed about our activities," the company said.

The attorney general's report may have precipitated last summer's raid on ERHC's Houston offices by the F.B.I. Among other things, F.B.I. agents took a file marked "William Jefferson," a reference to the Louisiana congressman, a publicly filed subpoena shows.

Dan Keeney, a spokesman for ERHC, said that the company was not aware of "any facts to suggest that the U.S. government investigation of ERHC is in any way related to the ongoing investigation of Congressman Jefferson."

Whatever the case, ERHC has emerged thus far as the biggest winner in São Tomé. Over the last year, it has sold off various rights to its holdings in São Tomé, making tens of millions of dollars in the process.

As for the reform effort by Mr. de Menezes, the country's president, he has been far less publicly vocal over the last year, outside consultants said. Mr. de Menezes, who met on several occasions with Mr. Jefferson, did not respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this article.

Despite earlier predictions of vast oil finds, it is unclear whether waters off São Tomé will ever produce oil in commercial quantities. Last year, Chevron drilled the first exploration well there but failed to find much oil and, for the moment, has no immediate plans to drill again. ERHC said that it and a partner planned to drill next year.

The new oil and anticorruption statutes drafted by consultants like Mr. Bell, the Washington lawyer, have become law. But with all the obscurity and intrigue that has now descended onto São Tomé, he, like others, question if it will make any difference.

"The game is not lost yet," Mr. Bell said. "But it is a very uphill game."

James Hill for The New York Times

Stenio da Luz dos Reis, 17, lives in Cape Verde but longs to join his mother in the Netherlands. She moved there in 2001 to find work.

MINDELO, Cape Verde -- Virtually every aspect of global migration can be seen in this tiny West African nation, where the number of people who have left approaches the number who remain and almost everyone has a close relative in Europe or America.

The intensity of the national experience makes this barren archipelago the Galapagos of migration, a microcosm of the forces straining American politics and remaking societies across the globe.

An estimated 200 million people live outside the country of their birth, and they help support a swath of the developing world as big if not bigger. Migrants sent home about $300 billion last year -- nearly three times the world's foreign aid budgets combined. Those sums are building houses, educating children and seeding small businesses, and they have made migration central to discussions about how to help the global poor. A leading academic text calls this the "Age of Migration."

But it is also the age of migration alarm, as European ships patrol African coasts to intercept human smugglers and new fences are planned along the Rio Grande. Countries that want migrant muscle and brains also want more border control. Many of them see illegal migrants as a security threat, especially in a terrorist age, and worry that large-scale migration, even when legal, can undercut wages, require costly services and subject national identities to bonfires of religious and cultural conflict.

The stakes can be seen here in Mindelo, a semicircle of barren hillsides that gaze out at the only sign of natural life, a beckoning sea. In a country with little rain and a history of famine, migration began as a necessity and became part of the civic DNA. You can dine at Café Portugal, drink at the Argentina bar and stroll Avenida da Holanda.

Yet Holland -- the Netherlands -- now requires would-be migrants to pass a test on Dutch language and culture. Other countries have raised the cost of visa applications, discouraged applicants by requiring them to travel to the Cape Verdean capital, Praia, and placed new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants. While the Netherlands has long been a favorite destination for residents of this island, a Cape Verdean song now warns that "Holland belongs to the Dutch."

Watch out
Because they can make you go back swimming
And you'll get home with seaweed in your teeth

Mindelo, Cape Verde's second-largest city, contains 63,000 people and about as many variations on the migrant's tale. On the hillside neighborhood of Monte Sessego, Maria Cruz, 70, beams at the living room suite her son sent from Rotterdam. Out toward the airport, Stenio da Luz dos Reis, 17, studies Dutch and hopes to join his mother in the Netherlands. Down by the beach, Orlando Cruz, 46, stares at vacant tables. He fell off a ladder in New Jersey and used the insurance money to start a hotel and restaurant, which are now nearly empty.

As construction racket fills her half-finished house, Evanilda Lopes, 27, speaks freely about the fraudulent papers that got her to the Netherlands. As he hustles change for his H.I.V. medication, Manuel Gomes, 41, is equally frank about the crimes that got him deported from Providence, R.I. He moved there as a child and grew up wild -- selling drugs, stealing cars and burglarizing homes. Now like hundreds of others deported here from the United States, he finds himself a man without a country, exiled to a world no less foreign for having been the place of his birth.

"You have a Cape Verdean here who would cut his right arm off to go back," said Mr. Gomes, who lives in a one-room hovel without running water or electricity.

If Cape Verde is the Galapagos of migration, Jorgen Carling, a Norwegian geographer, is its Darwin. A rising star on the academic circuit, Dr. Carling, 32, visited Cape Verde 10 years ago, taught himself Kriole, the local language, and has been returning ever since.

"Cape Verde is a showcase of the contradictions and frictions of global migration," he said. "It is in a quite dramatic transition -- from being so dependent on migration to trying to cope with a world in which borders are closing."

The tensions he cites abound. Migration reduces poverty. But it increases inequality between migrants and others back home. Migration can express family devotion. It can also strain family bonds.

And while migration may be at record levels, so is the frustration of people who want to migrate but cannot. That is because as migration grows, the desire to experience its economic rewards grows even faster.

"Migration is probably more important to more people than it has ever been," said Dr. Carling of the International Peace Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Oslo. "But what characterizes the world today is also the feeling of involuntary immobility."

These conflicts can be seen in a block home on a dusty hill where migration unites and divides four generations. At 79, the owner, Antonia Delgado, is old enough to remember famines, and she spent decades living in a shanty made of used oil drums. Thanks to the money her son sent from the Netherlands, she has four rooms, electric lights and indoor plumbing.

But she no longer has the son. He stopped calling more than five years ago, and she is not sure if he is alive. "I'm very worried," she said. "He helped me so much."

Now she relies on money sent by a second family migrant, her granddaughter Fatima, a nanny in Portugal. That brings Ms. Delgado monthly support of $135, but leaves her raising her granddaughter's son, an 11-year-old with a missing front tooth and irrepressible smile.

The boy, Steven Ramos, is sorting through parallel complexities. His mother's salary buys school supplies, martial arts lessons and the occasional DVD. But she left five years ago and has come home only once. His father works in the Netherlands and rarely calls. Steven called him "ingrote" -- for ungrateful -- choosing a Cape Verdean term for migrants who forget those left behind.

Though Steven's mother now has a work permit, she cannot get a visa for Steven, who has spent his childhood thinking their reunion was imminent. He cried when her recent visit ended but cast her departure in traditional Cape Verdeans terms, as something natural, necessary and good. "I cried, but I wasn't sad because I knew she needed to go," he said. " She went to give us better conditions."

An Identity Linked to Migration

Without migration, Cape Verde would not exist. The 10-island chain, 385 miles off the coast of Senegal, was uninhabited until the 15th century, when Portugal settled it with two migrant streams -- Europeans and African slaves. Cape Verde became a creolized mix of both continents and a supply depot for the slave trade.

Mass emigration began in the late 1800s on whaling ships that brought Cape Verdeans to New England. It continued after World War II with European guest-worker plans, which sought temporary labor but brought permanent settlement.

Those same plans brought Turks to Germany, South Asians to Britain and North Africans to France, and a generation later, many Europeans remain concerned about continuing cultural conflicts. "We asked for workers, but we got people," is a famous European lament.

Cape Verde gained independence from Portugal in 1975, about the time the guest-worker plans ended. Still, Cape Verdean migration continued -- legally (through family reunification laws) and illegally (through visitors who stay after visas expire). Many people here travel on tourist visas, then seek a European or American citizen to marry, often of Cape Verdean ancestry.

Migration is so central to their identity, Cape Verdeans often boast that emigrants outnumber the people who remain. That is true, Dr. Carling said, only when counting emigrants and their descendants. By that standard, he estimates there are 460,000 Cape Verdeans on the islands and 500,000 overseas, including 265,000 in the United States. "Sodade," the hit by Cesaria Evora, a Mindelo resident and a Grammy award winner, conveys "longing, longing, longing for my island."

Some scholars argue that migrants form a record share of the world's population, though weak data make historical comparisons difficult. Despite current alarm, migration is likely to grow. Rich economies with aging work forces need labor. Workers in poor countries need jobs. Border crossings are hard to prevent, and the rewards of moving have never been greater. The average pay raise awaiting today's unskilled migrants, in inflation-adjusted terms, is about twice as high as that which greeted migrants a century ago, during the last great period of global migration.

Economists generally argue that migration has helped rich economies expand by supplying needed labor, though some low-skilled domestic workers may suffer wage reductions because of increased competition.

From the start, Cape Verde has embraced its emigrants -- as kinsmen, investors, lobbyists for foreign aid, safety valves for population growth and eventually as voters. With migrant help, Cape Verde has doubled its per capita income since 1990, to about $2,100, a high figure by African standards. Remittances, the sums that migrants send home, make up 12 percent of the gross domestic product and once were twice as high. Migrants elect their own representatives to the National Assembly.

More broadly, however, development experts are split on the effects of migration. Remittances feed and shelter the poor, and migrants sometimes return with new business contacts and ideas. But migration can also drain countries of talent and promote dependency, among individuals and governments. No country has climbed out of poverty through migration alone. Despite the economic progress here, the unemployment rate hovers above 20 percent and the fastest-growing industry, tourism, is dominated by low-wage jobs.

While Dr. Carling admires Cape Verde's ability to invent itself as a nation beyond borders, he also sees problems with the constant emphasis on departures. It can weaken relationships, he said, leave marriages short-lived and promote indifference among students and workers. "The possibility of relying on remittances -- and the prospect of going abroad one day -- can alienate you from the environment here," he said.

Even as Cape Verdeans struggle to get out, others are migrating in. This, too, is characteristic of the age of migration -- most "sending" countries are also "receiving" countries, underscoring how universal the phenomenon is. Nearly half the migrants from poor nations move to other poor nations.

Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, is filled with Chinese shopkeepers chasing new markets and West African peddlers fleeing homelands torn by war and worse poverty. Many hope to move on to the Canary Islands, which are part of Spain, aboard dangerous smuggling boats on journeys that kill hundreds if not thousands every year.

"This is life and death," said Emmanuel Kofi Cathline, a local peddler who migrated from Ghana 17 years ago and once made money here helping migrants book the illegal journeys. Though crackdowns have chased him from the business, he remains loyal to what might be called the global migrants' creed. "If a place is no good, change it," he said. "Go to another place!"

A Test of Optimism

For all the rising barriers, many Cape Verdeans remain confident they will leave. Mr. da Luz dos Reis, the teenager studying Dutch, answered the door in a blaze of sartorial optimism: orange shorts and orange shirt -- can you guess the Dutch national color? -- with the word "Holland" stretched across his back.

His mother left for the Netherlands six years ago to work as a maid, and his younger sisters just joined her. Having passed his 16th birthday, Mr. da Luz dos Reis was left behind, with a workbook containing 100 questions in Dutch.

Thirty will appear on a test. No. 62 asks if it is important to learn Dutch quickly. (It is.) No. 59 asks if wife beating is permissible. (It is not.) Mr. da Luz dos Reis pays $70 a month for a tutor and must take the test in Dakar, two hours away by plane. But he is not one to gripe.

"It's good," he said of the test. "Then we get there with an idea of what it's like." Besides, he added, "it's their country."

Across town, Evanilda Lopes, 27, has more experience and less optimism. A stylish woman with rhinestones on her Coco T-shirt and blond extensions in her hair, she was raised on reports of fashion and comfort from six older siblings in Europe. She left school at 17 and spent five years seeking a tourist visa, which arrived only after she had created a fictitious bank account and job. "It was the way I could go," she said.

Things soured in the Netherlands. Her aunt lined up three Dutch men for her to marry, but Ms. Lopes rejected them all. The atmosphere in the house grew hostile. Ms. Lopes moved in with a Dutch plumber, and they had a child they named Giovanni. Cohabitors in the Netherlands have residency rights, but when the relationship expired so did her permission to stay.

She came home last fall with a cache of the luxury goods she had gone to Europe to find -- belts, handbags, sandals, perfume. She sold them on the streets and made enough money to start building a home for her and Giovanni, 5, who has just come home to a country he does not know.

Ms. Lopes alternately calls her time in the Netherlands a blessing and a curse. "I was young and I didn't know life was so hard," she said. With a half-finished house and half-formed plans, she has her shoes on one shore, her mind on another and her innocence lost somewhere in between.

By Daniel Howden, Deputy Foreign Editor

Published: 27 June 2007

The combined forces of population growth and urbanisation are creating a planet of slums, where the urban population will have doubled by 2030, according to a report released by the United Nations today.

The UN's findings echo recent predictions that 2008 will see a watershed in human history as the balance of the world's population tips from rural to urban. Many of the new urbanites will be poor and the shelters into which they move, or are born, will be slums.

"The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century," the report states. It maintains that over the next 30 years, the population of African and Asian cities will double, adding 1.7 billion people - more than the current populations of the US and China combined.

In this new world the majority of theurban poor will be under 25, unemployed and vulnerable to fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic.

Mike Davis, a population expert, described this emerging underclass in his recent work Planet of Slums as: "A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs for the dispossessed."

While some critics have accused Mr Davis of scaremongering, the UN's findings appear to back many of his basic assertions.

George Martine, a demographer and the author of today's report, said: "The urbanisation is jolting mentalities and subjecting them to new influences. This is a historical situation. And now one of the ways for people to reorganise themselves in this urban world is to associate themselves with new or strong, fundamentalist religion."

The rise of radical Islam in Africa, from the outskirts of Jakarta to the slums of Egypt, is well documented but the continent is also experiencing a Christian shift, with Pentecostalism winning converts from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Latin America, identified by the UN as the other engine of urban growth, the once all-encompassing Catholic Church is battling for hearts and minds with radical evangelical churches. This battle was one of the key points of Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to the world's most populous Catholic country, Brazil.

Urbanisation is inevitable, the report warns, and calls on planners to accept that the poor have the right to a place in the city. It argues that this influx can be positive if properly managed. No country in the industrial age has enjoyed economic growth without urbanisation.

"It's pointless trying to control urban growth by stopping migration," Mr Martine said. "It doesn't work. We have to change mindsets and take a different stance. We're at a crossroads and can still make decisions which will make cities sustainable. If we don't make the right decisions the result will be chaos."

UN-Habitat uses the term "slum household" to describe a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following: durable housing, sufficient living area, secure tenure and access to clean water and sanitation.

Until now the response of national and municipal governments to ballooning growth has been to discourage newcomers but this is a failed policy, the report argues. "It has resulted in less housing for the poor and increased slum growth," the reports says. "It also limits opportunities for the urban poor to improve their lives and to contribute fully to their communities and neighbourhoods."

Mr Martine argues for a more positive approach to urbanisation, saying that by providing land for housing with at least some services and planning in advance to promote sustainability, progress can be achieved.

Slums have been part of human communities since Mesopotamia but our modern concept of segregated slums for the poor comes from the Industrial Revolution. The difference between then and now is a question of scale, with today's slum dwellers being one-in-three of all city dwellers.

More than 90 per cent of this underclass are in the developing world, with South Asia having the largest share, followed by eastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In sub-Saharan Africa, growth has become synonymous with slums and 72 per cent of the population live in slum conditions.

Growth of urbanisation

* By 2008, more than half of the world's current 6.7billion population will live in cities.

* By 2030, the urban population will have risen to 5 billion, 60 per cent of the world's population.

* Half of the world's urban population is currently under 25. By 2030, young people will make up the vast majority of the 5 billion urban dwellers.

* Between 2000 and 2030, Asia's urban population will increase from 1.3 billion to 2.64 billion. Africa's population will rise from 294 million to 742 million, Latin America and the Caribbean from 394 million to 609million.

* Mega-cities do not have a monopoly on population growth. More than half of the urban world lives in cities with a population of less than 500,000.

Many of Alaska's roads, runways, railroads and water and sewer systems will wear out more quickly and cost more to repair or replace because of climate change, according to a study released yesterday.

Higher temperatures, melting permafrost, a reduction in polar ice and increased flooding are expected to raise the repair and replacement cost of thousands of infrastructure projects as much as $6.1 billion for a total of nearly $40 billion -- about a 20 percent increase -- from now to 2030, according to the study, by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The researchers speculated that in the distant future the costs would level off as the agencies adapted their practices to the warmer climate.

Temperatures have risen by an average of two to five degrees in different parts of the state in recent decades, and the changes have already been linked to problems like coastal erosion in remote Alaskan villages and wildfires. The researchers who wrote the report said their estimates for increased costs were based on "middle-of-the-road" forecasts for warming in a place where projects were designed to endure the cold.

"We assume warming temperatures mean infrastructure has to be replaced more often," the report said. "It's also possible the changing climate could actually increase the life of some structures, but we haven't so far identified any such exceptions."

The study is the first of its kind in Alaska, and its authors emphasize that it does not project costs for things like moving villages, protecting the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, fighting wildfires or protecting private property that may be affected.

"There are a million other issues related to climate change," said Peter Larsen, a natural resource economist at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and the lead researcher for the report. "This is just one component, but it's a critical piece because this is where all the goods and services come through the state's economy, is through the infrastructure."

Mr. Larsen said the most vulnerable places in the state were probably those built heavily on permafrost, the permanently frozen subsoil, whose average temperature is projected to rise above freezing in the future, potentially making the ground unstable.

"Those structures need to be investigated further," he said. "What happens to costs when you cross that freezing point threshold?"

With no simple template for how to measure increased infrastructure costs from climate change, Mr. Larsen said he and other researchers had settled on studying how higher temperatures and precipitation changes affect the life span of materials. Then they combined that data with forecasts for higher temperatures and climate change in Alaska.

"There are other places that have done studies," he said, "but Alaska is warming more quickly than any other place on the planet right now. There was nothing to this extent."

He said he had begun the research "from scratch," calling various state agencies. "I'd say something like 'Can you tell me how much the changing climate over the last 50 years has changed this piece of infrastructure?' " he said. "On more than one occasion I had people laugh at me on the phone."

• Tens of millions of people could be driven from their homes by encroaching deserts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, a report says.

  The study by the United Nations University suggests climate change is making desertification "the greatest environmental challenge of our times".

  If action is not taken, the report warns that some 50 million people could be displaced within the next 10 years.

  The study was produced by more than 200 experts from 25 countries.

This report does not pull any punches, says BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath.

One third of the Earth's population - home to about two billion people - are potential victims of its creeping effect, it says.

Tree-planting schemes may put pressure on scarce water resources

"Desertification has emerged as an environmental crisis of global proportions, currently affecting an estimated 100 to 200 million people, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of a much larger number," the study said.

The overexploitation of land and unsustainable irrigation practices are making matters worse, while climate change is also a major factor degrading the soil, it says.

READ THE REPORT IN FULL Re-thinking Policies to Cope with Desertification(1.75MB) Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the reader here

People displaced by desertification put new strains on natural resources and on other societies nearby and threaten international instability, the study adds.

"There is a chain reaction. It leads to social turmoil," said Zafaar Adeel, the study's lead author and head of the UN University's International Network on Water, Environment and Health.

The largest area affected was probably sub-Saharan Africa, where people are moving to northern Africa or to Europe, while the second area is the former Soviet republics in central Asia, he added.

Way forward

The UN report suggests that new farming practices, such as encouraging forests in dryland areas, were simple measures that could remove more carbon from the atmosphere and also prevent the spread of deserts.

"It says to dryland dwellers we need to provide alternative livelihoods - not the traditional cropping based on irrigation, cattle farming, etcetera - but rather introduce more innovative livelihoods which don't put pressure on the natural resources," Mr Adeel said.

"Things like ecotourism or using solar energy to create other activities."

Some countries like China have embarked on tree-planting programmes to stem the advance of deserts.

But according to the author, in some cases the trees being planted needed large amounts of water, putting even more pressure on scarce resources.