A senior United Nations aid official is calling for a comprehensive response to the crisis in Haiti, saying it is having a “massive” and “devastating” impact, with over half the population acutely food insecure and more than one million staring at emergency levels of hunger.
Having recently returned from the violence-wracked Caribbean country, Carl Skau, the deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, told journalists at UN Headquarters that the crisis is the worst since the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
“Half the population – some five million people are acutely food insecure,” he said, adding that over a million are in the IPC Phase 4 or Emergency level of hunger.
Skau stressed that a political and security response to the crisis needs to be accompanied by a robust humanitarian response.
“What I saw on the ground is that this can be done, also at the centre of the crisis, in Port-au-Prince. But that we need also to do more on resilience and development elsewhere to really try to break this vicious cycle,” Skau said.
The UN said Haitians have been facing a multitude of challenges over the years, encompassing political, security, social and economic issues.
It said the protracted crisis has been further exacerbated by months of brutal gang violence that claimed more than 2,500 lives in the first quarter of 2024 alone.
About 90,200 people are displaced in the Port-au-Prince Metropolitan Area, with that number continuing to rise, according to the UN humanitarian affairs office (OCHA).
At the same time, the UN said trade is disrupted in other parts of the country, inflation is rising sharply, and supplies are beginning to run out.
“The crisis is felt everywhere,” said Skau, urging a differentiated response.
“What we need is an emergency response in Port-au-Prince, but we can continue to do other kinds of support, including development support in the rest of the country,” he said, noting that aid supplies are starting to run out on the ground.
“And so, we would need to replenish also with shipments. So, we are hoping, having seen that the international airport opens at least for one flight, that that can be sustained and expanded, and also that there would be an opening of the port in Port-au-Prince,” he added.
Meanwhile, the UN said that hopes rose of political progress amid the multiple crises engulfing gang-ravaged Haiti, with the formal resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry on Thursday and the official installation of the Transitional Presidential Council.
Henry had agreed to step down in March after heavily armed criminal gangs seized the country’s airport and blocked his return. He will be replaced by former finance minister Michel Patrick Boisvert, who takes over as interim prime minister.
