ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- Oxfam, the international aid organization, says Ethiopia is facing what it calls a "toxic cocktail" of drought, high food prices, delivery problems and plagues.

Population explosion and a misguided land policy - two reasons why Addis Ababa is the architect of its own misery

It was at a railway crossing near Diri Dawa, the provincial capital in the Ethiopian Ogaden desert, that I saw them: small children's hands, blackened by sun, clutching at the slats of a cattle truck dumped on a siding. The year was 1984, the height of the Ethiopian famine that claimed about a million lives. These young things must have expired, hours later, of heat and thirst in temperatures peaking at about 48C, in the truck where they had deliberately been left to die.