With the At­lantic hur­ri­cane sea­son un­der­way, the UN World Food Pro­gramme (WFP) is sound­ing the alarm over Haiti’s hu­man­i­tar­i­an sit­u­a­tion.

With rough­ly half the pop­u­la­tion, 5.7 mil­lion peo­ple, fac­ing some sort of emer­gency lev­el of hunger, Haiti is one of five coun­tries in the world with cat­a­stroph­ic lev­els of hunger. More than one mil­lion peo­ple in Haiti are dis­placed due to on­go­ing gang vi­o­lence and in­se­cu­ri­ty.

As the hos­til­i­ties are dis­rupt­ing the food sys­tems and sup­ply chains in the cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, WFP is fac­ing a “quite dra­mat­ic” sit­u­a­tion, said Re­gion­al Di­rec­tor in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean Lo­la Cas­tro, who re­cent­ly re­turned from the coun­try.

Dis­placed pop­u­la­tions, no­tably in and around Port-au-Prince, are faced with a “very prob­lem­at­ic” sit­u­a­tion, she said, as hos­til­i­ties have re­cent­ly up­root­ed around 14,000 peo­ple from the com­mune of Ken­scoff.

“Ken­scoff is a com­mune where peo­ple used to come and sell their food,” she said, and the same peo­ple are now re­ly­ing on food as­sis­tance af­ter their hous­es were burned and their liveli­hoods de­stroyed.

With 6,000 cas­es of gen­der-based vi­o­lence hav­ing been re­port­ed this year, the sit­u­a­tion of women and girls in Port-au-Prince is dra­mat­ic, ac­cord­ing to Cas­tro.

The city is prob­a­bly “one of the most dan­ger­ous places in the world” for women and girls. “We need to pro­vide them sup­port to en­sure that they be­come less vul­ner­a­ble and are not ex­posed to all this vi­o­lence,” she said.

The 2025 Hu­man­i­tar­i­an Re­sponse Plan for Haiti calls for just over $908 mil­lion but is on­ly eight per cent fund­ed. Cas­tro said WFP alone needs $46.4 mil­lion over the next six months to sus­tain its emer­gency re­sponse and ad­dress the root caus­es of hunger and mal­nu­tri­tion.

The hur­ri­cane sea­son be­gan on June 1 and runs through the end of No­vem­ber. Cas­tro 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.

The WFP has warned that un­less re­sources are made avail­able, the agency will have no ca­pac­i­ty to re­spond—there are no con­tin­gency sup­plies, no lo­gis­ti­cal buffer, and no life­line for the most vul­ner­a­ble.

“We can­not for­get the peo­ple of Haiti,” Cas­tro said, call­ing on the hu­man­i­tar­i­an com­mu­ni­ty to pro­vide ur­gent sup­port. —PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (CMC)