“There is widespread poverty. We have to sell off our children to survive. We are not proud of it, but we have to do it.”

Those are the final sentences of this article, entitled “Starving Afghans sell girls of eight as brides.” Below is an excerpt:

Azizgul is 10 years old, from the village of Houscha in western Afghanistan. This year the wheat crop failed again following a devastating drought. Her family was hungry. So, a little before Christmas, Azizgul’s mother ‘sold’ her to be married to a 13-year-old boy.

‘I need to sell my daughters because of the drought,’ said her mother Sahatgul, 30. ‘We don’t have enough food and the bride price will enable us to buy food. Three months ago my 15-year-old daughter married.

‘We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis [ £2,000]. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in instalments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food.’

Azizgul is not unique. Hers is one of a number of interviews and case studies collected by the charity Christian Aid – all of them young girls sold by their families to cope with the second ruinous drought to hit Afghanistan within three years.

While the world has focused on the war against the Taliban, the suffering of the drought-stricken villagers, almost 2.5 million of them, has largely gone unnoticed. And where once droughts would afflict Afganistan once every couple of decades, this drought has come hard on the heels of the last one, from which the villagers were barely able to recover.

While prohibited by both Afghan civil and Islamic law, arranged marriages have long been a feature of Afghan life, particularly in rural areas. What is unusual is the age of some of the girls. And the reason: to buy food to survive. …

Via the Dees Diversion.