Amidst the severe drought affecting southern Madagascar this year, the population turned to a new way to satisfy their hunger by using white clay in food during the last months of the crisis, and the surprise was that the white mud helped many in the region to withstand starvation after it became what they hoped for research. For what feeds their hunger.
? White clay is a staple of the southern poor #Madagascar To circumvent hunger#France_Press pic.twitter.com/NVZjW9BS0J
– France Press in Arabic (@AFPar) December 12, 2020
Agence France-Presse toured the deserts of southern Madagascar and met the residents who appeared in the videos cooking white clay and eating it with their children, and Dami Zevindara, a charcoal seller, said: “If we had what to eat if our saliva was enough, we would not have had to eat this and we did not even know. White clay was previously edible. “
Using white clay to eat
Residents put mud to eat
Cactus is the main food source in this dry region, but even this plant suffers from water scarcity, which reflected a recession in its harvest season this year, and footage of the cactus scales wilted due to the lack of water was shown, adding to the great hardships this year.
Toharano, a housewife, expressed her grief over the condition they arrived at and caused the death of her children, saying: “My children did not eat for 3 days and died, and they died because I was their mother and I was not able to provide food for them. The famine killed them, and the disease or anything else did not kill them.”
Thomson Phiri, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said that nearly a million and a half people in southern Madagascar are suffering from an emergency hunger crisis, adding that hunger is increasing in the region as drought years exacerbate the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, which leads to devastating effects and perishes. On crops, and hinders people’s access to food.
He pointed out that the number of people in need of immediate food aid has become three times more than expected, and they are spread in 10 regions, and most of them are women and children, indicating that the situation is very worrisome and that the current hunger and malnutrition is the result of three years of crop destruction, noting that the food program The world plans to assist approximately 891,000 of the most vulnerable people until June 2021.
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