Gum Arabic is an ingredient you've probably never heard of, but chances are

you've used products that contain it.

I would venture to guess everyone has something in their house that has gum Arabic in it.

That's our colleague Alexandra Wexler.

Whether it's red wine, beer, Coca-Cola, medications.

It's often in pills as well as

syrups that you might have for kids, for cold and flu. I chewed some mentos chewing gum just before we got on

this call and it has gum Arabic in it.

Alexandra is based in Johannesburg South Africa and she covers commodities across the continent, from cocoa to coffee to

to COBOLT.

So what is gum Arabic?

So gum Arabic is a tree sap, a dried tree sap. It does things like hold

together syrup so that ingredients don't kind of like sink to the bottom that makes beer foamy so it's really the perfect ingredient

I suppose to add to all of these consumer goods because it doesn't taste like anything

or smell like anything.

Is gum Arabic something you write about a lot?

I'd never heard of gum Arabic before the war broke out and I don't think I ever would have done a story about gum Arabic had it not been for this conflict.

That conflict is the Civil War in Sudan, a war that the U.S US Ambassador to the UN has called the largest humanitarian crisis on

the face of the planet.

Sudan is now a war zone. These men just showed up.

First, they killed my husband, then my children.

The number of internally displaced people in Sudan

...