It has been suggested that the dark energy density \rho_v ~ 10^{-12} eV^4 in
the universe is associated with a metastable (false) vacuum, while the true
vacuum has a vanishing cosmological constant. By including supergravity
corrections we show how this is naturally realized in realistic supersymmetric
hybrid inflation models. With a fundamental supersymmetry breaking scale ~ TeV,
the LSP is not a suitable candidate for cold dark matter. We consider axion
physics to overcome this and simultaneously provide a resolution of the MSSM
\mu problem.Comment: 11 pages, no figure