Chad

REGION: West Africa
CAPITAL CITY: N'Djamena
POPULATION: 9,448,000
LAND AREA: Twice the size of Texas

Since 2003, Chad has been hit by spillover violence from the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, and has received about 200,000 Darfurian refugees. (Sudan's Darfur region lies just across the eastern border of Chad.) Also now streaming into Chad are refugees from conflict in the Central African Republic, to the south. Yet violence is not new to Chad. Both civil war and incursions by neighboring Libya plagued Chad for most of the latter half of the 20th century. Today, some 140,000 Chadians remain internally displaced; but except for the unrest from Darfur, Chad is at least tentatively at peace. Poverty, however, is widespread. Although rich in gold and uranium and in recent years an exporter of oil, Chad is primarily an agricultural country. More than 80 percent of the Chadian people rely on subsistence farming and livestock production, but only 2.8 percent of the land is arable and major challenges range from a weak infrastructure to desertification and recurrent drought.