Hunger in the slums of Cité Soleil
Published: Monday, 28 April 2008, 6:47PM
By James Mates
Cité Soleil, Haiti. 28th April 2008
I never thought I’d see people so hungry they’d resort to eating mud.
In a corner of the slums of Cite de Soleil we came across a group of women turning bags of mud (so fine it looked like sand) into little patties that were baked in the sun and then sold as a sort of food-substitute.
They contain a little bit of butter, some salt, but to all intents and purposes they have no nutritional value at all. But when we bought some for children who had not eaten all day, they devoured them; apparently they fill the stomach and fend off hunger, though we weren’t tempted to try.
It’s all a bit humbling, and certainly guilt inducing as we head out of Cite de Soleil and back to the Montana Hotel, not luxurious, but set up on a hill above Port au Prince and well above the misery we’d seen below.
Haiti’s in big trouble on the food front. It imports large quantities of food, particularly the staples rice and corn. Government budgets have already been hammered by rising oil prices, so it has little power to mitigate the effects of what’s happening to food.
Haiti’s farmers could be benefiting from the higher prices, but they weren’t efficient before these latest problems, and now find themselves spending so much money on diesel for machinery, fertiliser, and food for themselves that’s they’re now struggling to buy the seeds for future crops.
Normally the aid agencies would be able to plug some of the gaps, but six months ago they could buy rice on the international market at $400 a tonne, and now they’re paying an eye-watering $1100.
The regional director here of the World Food Program, Alejandro Chicheri, told me that unless the get hundreds of millions more from donors they will either give Haiti’s needy less food each, or be forced to tell some they can’t have any at all. Not a pretty choice for people who commit their lives to alleviating suffering.
Our first report in this series has been about the effect rising prices are having on the very poorest. Now we are going in search of the reasons for the explosion in the cost of basic food, starting with the rush for biofuels.
We’re heading to Argentina on an over-night flight from Miami, then flying out to one of the big agro-industrial concerns where crops that once went to feed people and animals are now being turned into ethanol to power internal combustion engines. Is this a moral way to use shrinking supplies of food? We’ll be asking that question.
You can track James' progress around the world by visiting out interactive food crisis map.