4 million people face 'acute food insecurity' in troubled Haiti, says UN food agency official

Source: Associated Press

4 million people face ‘acute food insecurity’ in troubled Haiti, says UN food agency official

BY EDITH M. LEDERER
Updated 9:54 PM EDT, March 12, 2024

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Four million people face “acute food insecurity” and one million of them are one step away from famine, the U.N. food agency’s director in the conflict-wracked Caribbean nation said Tuesday.

Jean-Martin Bauer told a virtual press conference that he’s “ringing the alarm bell” because the recent increase in gang violence has made a very bad situation even worse and displaced an additional 15,000 people — just over the first weekend in March in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

That brings the total number of displaced people in Haiti to over 360,000, he said, and the U.N. says half of them are children. The country has more than 11 million inhabitants.

Bauer said, there were 4 million food insecure and hungry Haitians during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and that number hasn’t gone down, but the number on the brink of famine has escalated to one million.

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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/un-haiti-humanitarian-food-famine-gang-violence-dc4115ab6d883722ef658e33f15806ba