Sala Aminata, a housewife from Logone and Shari Division in Cameroon’s Far North Region, looks at her six kids with apprehension as she tries to figure out how to feed them with her meagre salary. Rising food prices come after a drought late last year destroyed the majority of the harvest in the Sahel – the arid zone between the Sahara desert in North Africa and Sudan’s Savannas in the south. Rural populations throughout the region have started to run out of food since early February, six months before the next harvest is expected. And all governments in the Sahel, except for Senegal, have appealed for international assistance as 12 million people in the region are threatened by hunger.