Back from the desert

IMAGINE squeezing all the French into Switzerland. Such, roughly, is Egypt, a country that shoehorns 62m people into 49,000 square kilometres (19,000 square miles) of land, leaving 95% of its territory empty. To break out of this squash, the government is preparing to turn huge swathes of desert into farmland. If it succeeds—and if the Nile can deliver enough water—the next generation of Egyptians could be living in 25%, rather than 5%, of their country's 1m square kilometres.