Hunger surges in Haiti as gang violence, high food prices and a supercharged El Niño persist

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Nearly six million people in Haiti are experiencing severe hunger, with almost two million facing emergency conditions, according to a new report released Wednesday.

The worsening crisis in the Caribbean country of nearly 12 million people is blamed on a surge in gang violence and displacement, combined with high food and fuel prices and an extreme El Niño weather phenomenon that is threatening food security.

The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization noted Wednesday that the number of people experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity in Haiti — 5.94 million — is “one of the highest levels in the world today.” It noted that more than half of Haiti's population struggles to eat every day.

About one in two Haitians are unable to consistently access sufficient food, and the overall number of people with severe hunger is expected to surge to 6.35 million people — more than half of Haiti’s population — by mid-2027, according to the analysis published Wednesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a multi-partner U.N. initiative that analyzes food insecurity and malnutrition worldwide.

The number of Haitians facing severe hunger increased by nearly a quarter of a million since the initiative’s last report in April.

“The numbers are really, really alarming in comparison with other years,” Maxime Ngalula, Action Against Hunger’s country director for Haiti, said in a phone interview.

Many of those experiencing worsening hunger live in makeshift shelters and communities under fire by heavily armed gangs who are fighting Haiti’s National Police and a U.N.-backed gang suppression force.

Widespread gang violence in Haiti’s central region also has caused more hunger as farmers are chased from their lands and the main roads leading to Port-au-Prince and other areas are blocked, preventing goods from reaching the capital and other areas.

“The negotiation with gangs can take one, two, three days,” Ngalula said, adding that families sometimes travel up to nine miles (15 kilometers) to find a food distribution site because organizations are unable to access certain areas. “It’s not easy to serve them all.”

His organization distributes cash and food including rice and beans to help ease the hunger, but challenges remain, especially involving those left homeless by gang violence who are forced to move from one makeshift shelter to another.

“The strategy now is how to accompany these people or follow them,” Ngalula said.

In 2014, only 2% of Haiti’s population was food insecure, but a devastating Hurricane Matthew in 2016 that destroyed crops followed by a surge in gang violence have sparked widespread hunger.

The U.N.’s World Food Program noted it requires $78 million to sustain its operations in Haiti through March as the report issued Wednesday warned that “humanitarian assistance should be urgently scaled up to meet immediate needs.”

Deepening hunger comes amid a spike in fighting between gangs and the U.N.-backed force after four Salvadorean aviation technicians went missing in an attack on Oct. 18 in Port-au-Prince. Since then, El Salvador has deployed more than 1,000 soldiers to Haiti.

“We are very concerned about this surge in violence in densely populated neighborhoods of the capital,” Davina Hayles, Doctors Without Borders head of mission in Haiti, said in a statement on Wednesday. “We fear that this armed conflict will claim even more victims and displace even more people in the coming days, particularly with the arrival of additional international security forces.”

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