(CNN) -- Up to 30 million people are facing "a humanitarian
disaster" as one of Africa's biggest lakes shrinks, a United
Nations agency warned Thursday. Porters remove goods from a boat
on Lake Chad in 2007. Lake Chad was about the size of Maryland
-- bigger than Israel or Kuwait -- in 1963, satellite images
show. By 2001, it covered less than one-fifth of that area --
making it smaller than Delaware or Mauritius. The drying-up of
the shallow lake is fueling conflict and migration, the U.N.'s
Food and Agriculture Organization said. Once one of the biggest
bodies of water in the world, it could disappear entirely in
about 20 years, the FAO said, citing forecasts from the U.S.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "If that happens
it's going to be a disaster," Parviz Koohafkan, director of the
Land and Water Division of the FAO, told CNN by phone from Rome.
The Lake Chad basin is "one of the most important agriculture
heritage sites in the world -- the biodiversity, the migratory
birds, not to mention