Drought hammers Haiti countryside

ORIANI, Haiti (AP) — Only shrivelled carrots and potatoes grow in Carole Joseph’s small vegetable plot. The family’s chickens are long gone. She sold her only tools to buy food, then the wooden bed she shared with her children. The family now sleeps on the floor of their shack.

All that’s left to sell are the pots she uses to cook over a fire pit, when there’s something to eat.

The 28-year-old mother of four is among roughly 1.5 million Haitians who can’t get nearly enough nutrition because of a years-long drought that has spoiled harvests in her small mountain village and across large sections of the countryside.

“We get a little bit to eat and drink each day, but it’s never enough to get our strength back. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said, her voice hoarse as she cradled her toddler twins, their hair brittle and taking on a yellowish tinge, a sign of malnutrition.

For the last three years, a punishing drought has driven Haitians who were already barely getting by on marginal farmland even deeper into misery. Last year’s crop yields were the worst in 35 years in a country where more than two-thirds of people eke out a living from agriculture, many using archaic hand tools.

Read more at: Jamaica Observer