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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

UN restates need to help Haiti deal with hurricane season

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25 days ago
20250620

The Unit­ed Na­tions is re­it­er­at­ing con­cerns that Haiti will face se­vere prob­lems dur­ing the 2025 At­lantic Hur­ri­cane sea­son, amid se­vere fund­ing short­falls, con­tin­gency stocks are at their low­est lev­els ever.

Unit­ed Na­tions spokesman, Stéphane Du­jar­ric, said that the hu­man­i­tar­i­an coun­try team in the French-speak­ing Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (CARI­COM)  coun­try is sound­ing the alarm on the need for en­hanced pre­pared­ness for the hur­ri­cane sea­son which ends on No­vem­ber 30.

“De­spite fore­casts in­di­cat­ing an above-av­er­age sea­son, Haiti be­gins this hur­ri­cane sea­son with no pre-po­si­tioned food sup­plies and no avail­able fund­ing to launch a rapid re­sponse,”  Du­jar­ric said.

He said that this comes as 5.7 mil­lion peo­ple in the coun­try face se­vere food in­se­cu­ri­ty and more than 230,000 dis­placed hu­man be­ings are liv­ing in makeshift shel­ters, ”and those, as we have been telling you, are high­ly ex­posed to ex­treme weath­er.

“Our col­leagues al­so re­mind us that Haiti is one of on­ly five coun­tries world­wide with peo­ple in famine-like con­di­tions,” he said, adding that with sup­port from na­tion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners, “our hu­man­i­tar­i­an part­ners have pre-po­si­tioned some lim­it­ed stocks of hy­giene kits, tar­pau­lins, trau­ma sup­plies and nu­tri­tion sup­port, and plan to de­liv­er an­tic­i­pa­to­ry cash trans­fers to vul­ner­a­ble house­holds.

“How­ev­er, ad­di­tion­al fund­ing for re­lief ef­forts is ur­gent­ly need­ed,” Du­jar­ric said, not­ing that Haiti’s Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Re­sponse Plan re­mains on­ly eight per cent fund­ed, with just US$75 mil­lion re­ceived of the US$908 mil­lion re­quired for this year.

Mean­while, the Unit­ed Na­tions Of­fice for the Co­or­di­na­tion of Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Af­fairs (OCHA)  has been lead­ing mis­sions with UN agen­cies and oth­er stake­hold­ers “to see how aid op­er­a­tions can be re­sumed in ar­eas of high need fol­low­ing the May 26 sus­pen­sion of op­er­a­tions due to in­se­cu­ri­ty.

“Mis­sions have been car­ried out in a num­ber of ar­eas in the met­ro­pol­i­tan area of Port-au-Prince zone with fur­ther de­ploy­ments planned along Route Na­tionale 1, which con­nects the cap­i­tal to the north of the coun­try. These ef­forts aim to se­cure safe­ty guar­an­tees and en­able the safe re­sump­tion of hu­man­i­tar­i­an op­er­a­tions in those zones,”  Du­jar­ric said.

Ear­li­er this month, World Food Pro­gramme (WFP) sound­ed the alarm over Haiti’s hu­man­i­tar­i­an sit­u­a­tion.

Re­gion­al Di­rec­tor in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean Lo­la Cas­tro, who re­cent­ly re­turned from the coun­try. warned that at this time when half of all Haitians are al­ready go­ing hun­gry, a sin­gle storm could push mil­lions in­to a hu­man­i­tar­i­an cat­a­stro­phe.

While in past years, WFP had hu­man­i­tar­i­an stocks ready in the coun­try and could as­sist be­tween a quar­ter to half a mil­lion peo­ple in the im­me­di­ate af­ter­math of a dis­as­ter, “this year, we start the hur­ri­cane sea­son with an emp­ty ware­house,” she said.

UNIT­ED NA­TIONS, Jun 20, CMC 

CMC/gh/ir/2025


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