Posted on 02/16/2008 11:31:16 AM PST by IssuesOriented
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.
The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.
"When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day," Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.
Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. "When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too," she said.
Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.
The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.
The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.
At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.
Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.
Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.
Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.
The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.
A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.
Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.
Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.
"Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it," said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti's health ministry.
Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.
"I'm hoping one day I'll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these," she said. "I know it's not good for me."
Well, when you worship voodooism and Satanism, this is bound to happen.
Waiting for the Barack supporters to hold up his .7% GDP giveaway to the U.N. as a justification and cure-all for all things like this now.
The U.S., alone, has provided Haiti’s 8 million people with more than $600 million in foreign aid over the past six years. Where did it go? What was it used for? What is wrong with this picture?
I’m sure we’ll be sending a few billion over there too. Africa gets 30 billion for “aids research”, why not throw some more at this hellhole?
16 year old with five siblings, unemployed parents, and already has a child of her own.
STOP F-—ING.
My thoughts exactly.
Raising Arizona.
Ear-Bending Cellmate: ...and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.
H.I.: You ate what?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: We ate sand.
[pause]
H.I.: You ate SAND?
Ear-Bending Cellmate: That’s right!
Haiti is an island. If I were hungry, I’d go down to the sea and fetch some fresh food.
Fellow Freepers, much of world hunger results from corruption and dictators who fear free markets and free people! Keeping them hungry keeps them under control.
Five bucks for a bucket of tasty dirt..........
Funny thing is that the Dominicans live on the same island and I don’t hear much about them starving.
He said the people looked at him like he was food. He said he saw nothing in there eyes....just dull, animal like desperation.
He was clearly shaken. This was a guy who worked for a major U.S. company and who was obviously well off.
Having been raised on white oppression grievance politics, and maybe even being the beneficiary of it, he was having a hard time coming to grips with a black ruled country that clearly has no one else to blame but itself.
The other Carribbean islands that are still French departments are nowhere near this bad. In fact, some, like Martinique, are positively well off.
But then, they aren't ruled by primitives reverting to jungle tribalism.
Wow!!! Great pic. That guy’s so poor he can’t even afford fenders on his bike!
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