Source: United Nations (Video News)
The Regional Director for the World Food Program (WFP) in Latin America and the Caribbean, Lola Castro, today (3 Jun) said WFP in Haiti is facing the start of the hurricane season “with an empty warehouse where we have no stocks for assisting any emergency.”
Castro, talking to reporters in New York via Video Teleconference, said, “at this moment half of the population of Haiti are facing hunger or some kind of emergency levels of hunger. And this is 5.7 million people. And Haiti also is one of the five countries on the world that we have catastrophic levels of hunger. In fact, in the displaced camps of port au Prince, we have around 8,500 people who are really suffering without food, water, sanitation, and it is really traumatic to have this in this Western hemisphere.”
She said, “around 14,000 people that have been recently displaced from Kenscoff,” a commune where “people used to come and sell their food into the city.”
The humanitarian official said, “now they are basically receiving food assistance because their houses have been burned, their livelihoods are being destroyed,” adding that “the conflict is really disrupting the food systems and the supply chains that we have in Port au Prince and Haiti itself.”
She noted that “6,000 women and girls have reported some type of gender-based violence, which is really not acceptable,” stressing that Port-au-Prince “is probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl now.”
Castro said, WFP, “despite all the violence, displacement and collapse” is still working in Haiti, reaching “over 1.3 million people this year until March.”
She said, “the situation that we’re facing now is quite dramatic, because when we are looking at our stocks dwindling and disappearing and we have only stocks to assist any emergency, or any new displacement, or anybody facing IPC 4 up to July.”
As the hurricane season approaches, she said, “we have no cash neither to go and buy locally if it was possible in some areas, or to do a rapid humanitarian response. We are very concerned that a single storm can put hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti again into humanitarian catastrophe and hunger.”