Poverty is adding to the challenges of recovering from a massive tornado that pushed through Mississippi. Two of the counties hit by the Friday storm are Sharkey and Humphreys. They are among the most sparsely populated in the state. They have only a few thousand residents in communities scattered across wide expanses of cotton, corn and soybean fields in the flatlands of the Delta. Many people live paycheck to paycheck working jobs in agriculture. Sharkey’s poverty rate is 35%, and Humphreys is 33%. That compares to about 19% for Mississippi and under 12% for the entire U.S.
