Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt
By JONATHAN M. KATZ – 5 days ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — 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, I think that takes the record for longest comment, pac. :-)
Send me the source, if you can find it. '08 is getting off to quite a start.

And if they cant figure out why the bees are dying we'll be in real big trouble.

lol...TIME*TREAT... Below is the source.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hcJ474CjaJGOUznskl4ZgTHdpxUAD8UFQVR00

I heard that one reason the bees were dying off was because of some chemical imbalance in a temporary natural cycle.

I understand in this area some wild bees are starving because of spikes of warmth in the winter which breaks their dormancy and there is nothing for them to feed on. They've recommended planting native plants which bloom in cold temps.

I think these bio-fuels are a big mistake. All tillable land should be farmed at the owner's discretion and all subsidies for unused land should be eliminated.   Farmers in the U.S. with thousands of acres of farmland are getting the most in subsidies and usually are wealthy. The average farm owner does not benefit. The farmers have a strong lobby in Washington to keep it the way it is.

The use of bio-fuels is a knee jerk reaction to the planet warming.   90% of the warming is due to the sun's current volatility and cycle. The surface temperature on Mars has risen also and nobody lives there that we know of. It happens on a regular cycle on this planet. Planet cooling will follow. That's the cycle, ice ages and warm periods. We'll have to cope with it. Eliminating green house gases is a fine goal for our ozone layer and the air we breathe. I'm all for it. But let science find a better energy source, not a politician or a world body or an ex-President.

Obviously the use of bio-fuels is affecting the world's food supply. Eating today is more important than what MIGHT happen in 20 years.

Have forgotten who but someone posted a couple of years back that our oceans are the greatest source of greenhouse gasses (working from memory so anyone remembering reading that post please clarify). If indeed it's oceans emitting greenhouse gasses affecting ozone layers then there is little we can do about it because it's part of a natural cycle.

I don't know about oceans and greenhouse. But for all those people out there who want to save the trees in the rain forest because of the oxygen they give off....well...90 percent of all the oxygen in this world comes from the algae close to the surface of the oceans, not trees. However, we only have about 20 percent of all the species of animals that we had 200 years ago. That should be the concern, not loss of oxygen.

What happened to fish...There is more ocean than land...You can only grow so much chicken...Yet fish abound in the ocean?

they hit us where it hurt the most...I kind of figure this was going to happened but didn't think it will happened yet...This is something i was completely not thinking about...I totally forgot about it....