Dishing up dirt: Haiti, mud cakes and the bumpy road to better nutrition

Before I could advise otherwise, he broke off a crumb, put it in his mouth, and winced. “Some mud tastes okay,” he confessed. “But this is really bitter.” On the submission form he wrote Torta de barro (mud cake). The assessment would take about a week. It was during the 2008 food crisis that I first heard about Haitian mud cakes. They’re wads of wet clay, spread into palm-sized discs and dried in the sun. Sometimes the cake makers add salt or margarine to the mix. Once dried, the brittle platters are taken to the market where the poorest of the poor buy them for a few cents each. Mud cakes serve one purpose: to fill you up when the hunger hurts too much. I wrestled with the whole concept. How could people be eating mud? Not only that, but eating mud a few hundred miles from the billowing palms and pimped rides of Miami Beach? It’s haunted me ever since. Almost a decade later, on the streets of Haiti’s complicated capital, Port-Au-Prince, I wanted to see if mud cakes were still available. Were they a temporary response to crisis, or something of a staple? Comfortingly, they were harder to find than expected. But eventually, our fixer homed in on a group of plantain sellers in a busy market. One of them disappeared around the back of a wooden shack, returning with a basket containing about 20 of the unmistakable cakes. I asked for a dollar’s worth and got five. Tourist price. Back in the car, CIAT economist Carolina Gonzalez broke a piece off and tasted it. “Pure mud,” she quickly concluded. I said I’d try one later.

Perfect storm

In a country where up-to-date nutrition statistics are hard to come by, mud cakes are a proxy for dietary desperation. The numbers that do exist are sobering: Haiti is in the bottom 10 percent of countries in the United Nations Human Development Index, sharing joint-163rd position out of 188 with Uganda. It’s almost 40 places below the next least developed country in the Americas, Honduras (124th). According to the World Food Programme, 100,000 children in this country of 10 million people suffer from acute malnourishment, 1 in 3 is stunted, and a third of women and children are anaemic. Vitamin A deficiency is also widespread in children, causing weakened immune systems, and in some cases, blindness. The fact that the country also depends on imports for almost half its food means it’s exposed to shocks, like the food price hikes of 2008. That, together with endemic corruption, threadbare or non-existent infrastructure, earthquakes and hurricanes have all conspired to keep the country in the doldrums for decades. When things are this bad, it’s no wonder that sometimes some people have little option than to eat mud. Kick-starting agriculture in the country could help reduce import dependence, boost incomes, and improve nutrition. But it’s no mean feat, and many have tried. Farmers lack seeds, machinery, and irrigation systems, plus Haiti has notoriously poor soils and no official agricultural advice service. Despite the challenges, HarvestPlus took the plunge in 2012. The programme works to breed critically important vitamins and micronutrients into staple crops and get them to farmers and consumers. Four of its scientists won the 2016 World Food Prize for their work, specifically on vitamin A-rich sweet potato, which has already reached millions of people in Africa. By 2030, the programme hopes to reach 1 billion people with a range of nutritionally superior crops. But so far, few of these have made it to Haiti. That’s partly because even where there’s a will, the way is not always so obliging. One shipment of vitamin A-rich cassava seedlings, developed by HarvestPlus scientists at CIAT in Colombia and sent to Port-Au-Prince, were dead within a fortnight. Poor conditions in local greenhouses saw them shuffle quickly off their mortal coil. A second batch was wiped out when Hurricane Matthew took the roof off another greenhouse. In a more recent attempt, members of CIAT’s Cassava Research Program carried 200 seedlings to Haiti in jam jars. Only 40 survived, but that was enough for the next phase of work to start. They have now been transplanted to experimental fields. The big unknown is how they will fare against local pests and diseases. Seeds of iron-rich beans — much easier to transport than cassava seedlings — have been successfully tested and selected in Haiti, a result of work by CIAT and Catholic Relief Services. If HarvestPlus work on beans moves ahead in Haiti, these will be the varieties they use. But CIAT’s Bean Research Program leader Steve Beebe knows it won’t be plain sailing from here: A lack of storage facilities means heat and humidity can damage the seeds before they reach farmers, or on farms prior to planting. When it comes to rice, Haiti’s main staple, the situation gets murky. Trade liberalisaton in the 1980s and ‘90s saw the country flooded with cheap, imported rice. This undercut local farmers and all but wiped out domestic production. Even today, Haiti imports around 80 percent of its rice. And while varieties rich in zinc are on the HarvestPlus inventory, many of the people we met in Haiti didn’t want to talk about rice. Several times when the crop was mentioned, the conversation was mysteriously shut down. And more than once we were told that rice was “too political.” I took it to mean that there are probably some powerful people with vested interests in those rice imports, whose feathers you’d do well to avoid ruffling. Fortunately, rice isn’t completely off-limits. In the north of the country – one of the areas where domestic rice production prevails — HarvestPlus work with the iF Foundation*, is going well. Zinc-rich rice could soon be used in iF’s school feeding programme. And in the southern town of Les Cayes, we saw a cluster of paddy fields swaying in the pre-storm breeze. This type of rice — known locally as M8 — is very likely a variety developed by CIAT and introduced to the country sometime in the 1980s. It’s hard to be sure because Haiti has no formal system for registering the release of new crops, and no facilities for checking their genetic identity. Also, there are restrictions on sending samples abroad for analysis. But we were told that farmers really like M8: The grains are longer and tastier than imported rice. Also, since they’d grown this particular variety reliably for years, they had faith in it. It means that breeders could cross M8 with high-zinc varieties to get productive, nutritionally superior rice that farmers are happy to grow and that consumers like. If nothing else, it’s an extra option. The HarvestPlus work that’s perhaps most advanced in Haiti involves sweet potato. To get a closer look, we headed out of the western city of Saint Marc and quickly reached farmland. There, a team of local partners were harvesting trials of the vitamin A-rich types developed by the International Potato Center. I was told that when the seedlings arrived in the country, they were nurtured in a hotel room for days. They survived, becoming the predecessors of the plump sweet potatoes we saw being plucked out of the soil. The team ensured they were free from pests and diseases as part their work to multiply the stock; next they’ll be distributed to farmers. While this isn't exactly the rubber hitting the road with regard to establishing nutritionally improved crops in Haiti, HarvestPlus is no stranger to creative problem solving and persistence. For Marillia Nutti, HarvestPlus coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, the challenges point to the need for in-country crop improvement programmes, and closer ties with Haiti’s increasingly capable universities, to help the work gain traction. Despite the headaches so far, it seems worth the effort. After all, of all the countries in the Americas in which HarvestPlus works, Haiti probably has the greatest need for nutritionally improved crops. And they must be better than mud. Back at CIAT’s Analytical Services Lab in Colombia, I wanted to find out just how much better.

Make or bake

As I awaited the results of the mud cake test, I found myself gunning for the underdog. I was hoping for just one small surprise, some kind of redeeming nutritional feature. In fact, there were several surprises. The cake contained around 50 percent more iron than the equivalent weight of nutritionally improved beans. It also contained roughly 4.5 times the potassium of a banana and similar levels of zinc as a small oyster. Could this modest mud cake really be some kind of superfood? It sounded too good to be true. It was. CIAT nutrition expert Luis Londoño walked me through the results, bringing both me and the mud cake down to Earth with a bump. “There are high levels of some nutrients,” he agreed. “But they’re not bioavailable; when you eat them, your body can’t access them.” He explained that the nutrients were locked inside silicates — complex salts with hard shells that pass through the human body undigested. But he did confess to being momentarily shocked by the result for fat content. At first, it looked like a false positive; as a rule, there’s no fat in mud. But as he investigated mud cakes online, the source of the fat became clear: The maker of this particular cake had indeed added some margarine to the mix. So that’s that: Mud cakes are closer to pottery than food. “There’s nothing surprising at all?” I prodded. “For me, the only surprise is that people actually eat these,” he replied, solemnly. Back at my desk with the pieces of mud cake in front of me, I broke off a crumb and put it in my mouth. Call it primary research if you like. But I felt compelled to get a glimpse of what that level of dietary desperation tasted like. And just like Dayron, I winced.

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HarvestPlus is part of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) which helps realize the potential of agricultural development to deliver gender-equitable health and nutritional benefits to the poor. CGIAR is a global agriculture research partnership for a food-secure future. The HarvestPlus program is coordinated by two of these centers, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The iF Foundation seeks to improve and enable the health and well-being of families living in the farming regions of the North Department of Haiti through the development and support of sustainable solutions aimed at poverty alleviation, education and economic development. https://www.if-foundation.org/who-we-are/