Haiti at risk of famine as gangs overtake country

``This is not the usual chronic food crisis in Haiti. This is extremely bad,'' said Jean-Martin Bauer, the World Food Programme's country director for the Caribbean state.

Even as Canadian aid feeds thousands, the United Nations is warning that Haiti’s political chaos is putting the country at risk of famine, as farmers get kidnapped and the desperate turn to vigilante justice against gangsters.

“This is not the usual chronic food crisis in Haiti. This is extremely bad,” said Jean-Martin Bauer, the World Food Programme’s country director for the Caribbean state.

“It’s very difficult to organize a peaceful election with a starving population.”

In an assessment last October, some 20,000 people in Haiti were classified as being in catastrophic food insecurity, which Bauer says is the first time that people in the Americas have been characterized as being at risk of famine.

Bauer said the hardest-hit demographic live in Cite Soleil, a gang-controlled area of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where residents face conditions more often found in parts of Somalia and Afghanistan.

Some five million people — half the country’s population — are now at the “crisis” stage of food insecurity, the third level of five within the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. They face above-average levels of malnutrition.

Those who are at “catastrophic” risk are at level five. As soon as 20 per cent of a population reaches that stage, it is considered to be suffering famine.

Bauer said the hunger is fuelling gangs — and is being exacerbated by the armed groups. Haiti entered a political crisis in mid-2021 with the assassination of its president, and has since been ruled by de facto President Ariel Henry, under whose leadership gangs have filled a power vacuum.