PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Majorie Edoi, a 30-year-old mother of three, once sold food from a stand in Haiti’s capital. But armed conflicts with gangs have cut off the city from suppliers, paralyzing trade routes and pushing Haiti to its highest levels of hunger on record. Now, she sells what little she can in one of the many makeshift camps for displaced people set up across Port-au-Prince’s schools.
“We can’t buy anything. We can’t eat. We can’t drink,” Edoi said. “I’d like there to be a legitimate government to establish security so we can move around and sell goods, so the children can go to school.”
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an international benchmark for assessing hunger, reports that nearly 5 million people in Haiti—almost half the population—are struggling to feed themselves due to the conflict. Since the assassination of Haiti’s last president in 2021, armed gangs have expanded their power, taking over most of the capital and spreading to nearby farmlands, bringing looting, arson, mass rapes, and indiscriminate killings.
In June, the first contingent of a long-delayed U.N.-backed force of mostly African troops arrived in Haiti to bolster its under-resourced security services. Kenyan police began patrolling the capital, met with cautious optimism from residents, though the majority of the force’s arrival remains unclear.
For mothers like Edoi and 45-year-old Mirriam Auge, change cannot come fast enough. “We can’t do anything—there’s no money, no trade,” said Auge, who was forced out of her home three months ago. She now shares a chair to sleep on with her two daughters and five others in a makeshift school shelter crammed with tents. “We lost everything in our homes,” she said. “I cried while everyone was sleeping.”
Unable to work, these families depend on food rations and hygiene kits delivered by non-governmental organizations, whose drivers brave stray bullets along Port-au-Prince’s ever-changing battle lines. The U.N. World Food Program (WFP) is a major supplier of these meals, working with farms and kitchens staffed largely by women to deliver food to the camps.
“It’s tricky,” said WFP Haiti director Jean-Martin Bauer. “There might be a shooting near one of the locations we distribute through, so you might have to cancel and leave people without a meal that day. These are the calls we need to make.”
WFP has tried to shorten its supply chains, sourcing food such as sorghum grains and callaloo—a leafy green popular in the Caribbean—from nearby farms instead of risking longer transport through gang-controlled roads and shuttered ports. Nonetheless, Bauer said the WFP lacks enough food to meet its distribution plan, pointing to a 2024 U.N.-wide humanitarian fund for Haiti that is over $500 million below target.
A Long-Brewing Food Crisis
Haiti’s food crisis has been long in the making. In the 1980s, U.S. export policies and trade liberalization encouraged by multilateral lenders saw import tariffs slashed, leading to an influx of U.S. rice that displaced local producers. Once self-sufficient in rice production, Haiti now imports around 80% of its rice.
Farmers in the Artibonite, Haiti’s breadbasket, face shootings, theft, racketeering, and extortion by armed gangs. Madan Sara, the tradeswomen who traditionally bring produce from farms to markets, are often kidnapped and raped, U.N. agencies report.
Rita Losandieu, 53, cares for her two granddaughters in a small, bare-brick house. Her daughter works in the Dominican Republic, which built a wall to thwart migration and deported over 200,000 Haitians last year. “To buy something to eat, you need a lot of money. It’s very difficult,” Losandieu said. Her two sons work odd jobs to help make ends meet.
Many children in Haiti face limited options for obtaining food, leading some to join gangs or turn to prostitution. “If you are displaced or your family doesn’t have a place to sleep, you may need to join armed groups just to cover your needs,” said Save the Children Haiti food adviser Jules Roberto.
Soaring food prices have also fueled the crisis. Fresh fish sold for 60% more in March than a year ago, while cooking oil and rice both increased by 50%, according to Haiti’s IHSI statistics agency.
“We need to have a security response force but also a robust humanitarian response,” Bauer said. “Haiti will never be at peace as long as half its citizens are starving.”
