Herat, Afghanistan (CNN) An unprecedented drought in Afghanistan has led to families selling their children just to be able to feed their households.

CNN has spoken to multiple families around the western city of Herat who have been forced from their homes because of a record dry spell that, according to the United Nations, has forced more people from their homes in 2018 than the record violence afflicting the country.

The UN estimates that over 275,000 people have been displaced by the drought, 84,000 of them in the city itself, and 182,000 in the region of Badghis.

Four years of failed rains have savaged the agriculture of the region, and even caused the opium crop to fall by a third this year, despite record output in 2017. The extreme weather conditions are causing concerns that global climate change is having a severe impact on the world's most fragile country, where decades of war have ground the economy and society to dust.

Outside Herat, in a refugee camp, a CNN cameraman met Mamareen, who has lost her husband to the war, her home to the climate and now her daughter to the urgent need to feed her other children. Akila, 6, is now, under the warped economy of this tent city, the possession of another family. Mamareen sold Akila for $3,000 to Najmuddin, who has promised her to his 10-year-old son, Sher Agha.

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