UN: Haiti faces record hunger, food stocks are dwindling and warehouses sit empty

Miami Herald

3 days ago

Haiti, torn by violence and rampaging gangs, is one of five countries in the world facing catastrophic levels of hunger, with nearly half the population going without food, the regional director of the United Nations food agency said Tuesday.
The World Food Program's supplies in Haiti warned are 'dwindling and disappearing,' said Lola Castro, who heads the agency's Latin America and Caribbean office. There isn't enough food to help with new emergencies or new people forced to flee their homes after July, she said, noting that of the record 5.7 million Haitians experiencing severe hunger, 8,400 face outright starvation while 2 million are already in an emergency phase.
'This year, we start the hurricane season with an empty warehouse where we have no stocks for assisting any emergencies,' Castro said. 'We have no cash, either, to buy locally if it [is] possible in some areas, or to do a rapid humanitarian response. We are very concerned that a single storm can put hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti into a humanitarian catastrophe and danger.'
Haiti is already facing escalating gang violence and ongoing economic collapse. Any amount of sustained rain, much less a hurricane in what's expected to be a busy season, can plunge the nation into more distress.
An analysis from the U.N.'s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which analyses hunger and malnutrition globally, noted that the number of Haitians facing severe hunger increased by more than 300,000 people over last year, to 5.7 million.
Equally concerning is the agency's school feeding program, which is in danger of being drastically reduced due to a lack of money.
'We normally assist around half a million children every day, but those numbers will be reduced to half' if the agency doesn't get additional resources, Castro told journalists in New York during the U.N.'s daily press briefing. 'More importantly, this food is bought mostly locally from the smallholder farmers, women and men producing in some areas in rural Haiti.'
Castro visited Haiti last week and returned Sunday.
'I was watching the situation with women and girls there, and really, it's really dramatic: 6,000 women and girls have reported some type of gender-based violence, which is really not acceptable,' she said. 'Port-au-Prince is probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl now and we have to stop that.'
So far, that support is not coming. On Tuesday, the Trump administration proposed cutting $33 million out of $1.5 billion in foreign assistance funding for this year, including to U.N. programs, already hit this year by U.S. cuts to foreign aid and the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
'The UN has taken advantage of American generosity for too many years,' the administration wrote in justifying the proposed cuts.
Other governments are not contributing, either. A $900 million humanitarian appeal launched by the U.N. earlier this year to help deal with Haiti's humanitarian challenges has only raised 9% of the money, Castro said.
The World Food Program alone, which launched a separate appeal in February to keep its leased helicopter running in the country to be able to move aid workers around, needs $46 million.
'We're looking at our stocks dwindling and disappearing,' Castro said, stressing that despite the ongoing violence and dangers, the agency has managed to help more than 1.3 million people this year.
'We just want to make sure that the people of Haiti are not forgotten,' she added. 'There's a huge need, and they are very close to us, just across here in the Caribbean.'
Haiti's powerful armed gangs have brought the country to its knees. Their quest for territorial control has driven more than a million people out of their homes, including 40,000 who live in the hills above the capital in Kenscoff. Once growers of their own foods, the farmers are dependent on the World Food Program and others for assistance.
'They are basically receiving food assistance because their houses have been burned,' Castro said. 'Their livelihoods have been destroyed.'
On Sunday the country marked a solemn anniversary: four years since rival criminal gangs from Village-de-Dieu and Grand-Ravine killed police officers and residents to take control of Martissant, turning it into a no man's land on the southern outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
The invasion marked the first takeover by by gangs of a major area. Despite promises by members of the current Transitional Presidential Council to reopen the road to Martissant and take back the region, it remains under gang-rule — along with 27 other neighborhoods, according to a report published this week by the Port-au-Prince based Center for Analysis and Research in Haiti.
The human rights group noted that while the storming of Martissant was the beginning of 'the lost territories' and the establishment of gangs' domination, a total of 25 neighborhoods in the west region, which includes Martissant and Port-au-Prince, are now under their control.
In the quest for control, gangs have killed, raped and forced the relocation of 102 public institutions and 622 private ones, some of which have been vandalized and burned, the report noted.