PETIT GOÂVE, Haiti (AP) — Amizia Renotte sat on a broken piece of concrete and pointed to a large pile of dirt where her house once stood before the outer bands of Hurricane Melissa crumpled it as the storm lashed Haiti’s southern region.
The Atlantic hurricane season may be over, but thousands of people like Renotte in this Carribean country and beyond are still looking for food and struggling to rebuild their lives nearly two months after the Category 5 storm pummeled the northern Caribbean region as one of the strongest Atlantic storms in recorded history.
“We ran. We had nothing to save,” Renotte said as she recalled waking up in the middle of the night surrounded by floodwaters.
Melissa killed at least 43 people across Haiti, many of them in Petit-Goâve, where residents are still digging out from under the storm that unleased deadly flooding.
Huge piles of dirt and mud now smother this southern coastal town, which once bustled with farmers and street vendors.
The groan of heavy machinery fills the air as crews slowly clear debris scattered by La Digue River, which swept away children, cars and homes in late October.
“People lost everything,” resident Clermont Wood Mandy said. “They lost their homes. They lost their children.”
Hunger persists
Petit-Goâve held a mass funeral in mid-November to say its goodbyes to loved ones, but hunger and frustration remain.
On a recent morning, people crowded around a small convenience store stocked with pasta, butter, rice and other basic items produced locally after receiving cash donations.
In line to buy something was 37-year-old Joceline Antoine, who lost five relatives in the storm.
“My house is destroyed,” she said.
Lola Castro, a regional director with the U.N.’s World Food Program, or WFP, who recently traveled to Petit-Goâve, said in a phone interview Friday that Melissa has deepened Haiti’s crises.
“Around 5.3 million people don’t have enough to eat every day in Haiti,” she said. “That’s a huge challenge.”
Castro noted that Petit-Goâve was an agricultural community that depended heavily on crops, including plantain, corn and beans.
“They have lost their income. They have lost their means of living,” she said.
‘No community will be forgotten’
Jamaica also is struggling to recover from Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall in the western part of the neighboring island in late October, causing an estimated $8.8 billion in damage.
The storm killed at least 45 people, and 13 others remain missing, with an additional 32 deaths under investigation, according to Alvin Gayle, director-general of Jamaica’s emergency management office.
Authorities have reported 30 confirmed cases of leptospirosis — an infection transmitted from animals — and another 84 unconfirmed ones, with 12 related deaths. There were also two cases of tetanus, one of them fatal.
“These figures underscore the scale of the human impact and the seriousness with which the ministries, departments and agencies of government continue to approach the recovery effort,” Gayle said.
More than 100 shelters remain open in seven of Jamaica’s parishes, housing more than 1,000 people.
Meanwhile, some 160 schools remain closed.
“No community will be forgotten,” Gayle said.
Jamaica recently announced that it obtained a $150 million loan to help restore electricity as quickly as possible, with officials saying they expect power to fully be restored by the end of January.
Jamaica also has obtained a $6.7 billion package for reconstruction efforts over three years from the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean; the Caribbean Development Bank; the Inter-American Development Bank Group; the International Monetary Fund; and the World Bank Group.
Call for funding
In Cuba, hundreds of people remain in makeshift shelters nearly two months after the hurricane made landfall in the eastern region of the island hours after it hit Jamaica.
No storm-related deaths were reported in Cuba, where authorities evacuated more than 700,000 people from coastal areas.
Nearly a month after the storm, the U.N. said that about 53,000 people in Cuba had been unable to return to their homes, including 7,500 living in official shelters.
Castro, of the WFP, said that Hurricane Melissa affected 6 million people overall in the Caribbean, including 1.2 million in Haiti.
Around 1.3 million people in the region now need food, security or other type of support, with WFP so far helping 725,000 of them, Castro said.
She said she hopes that number will grow, noting that the agency’s $83 million appeal is only 50% funded.
ROME, Aug 15 (IPS) – Corinne Fleischer, WFP’s regional director for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, describes Gaza as “a terrible situation getting worse.” Over the past two weeks, 21 United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) food distribution points have been closed under evacuation orders.
“UNRWA says that 86% of the Strip is under an evacuation order,” she says on a video call from her office in Cairo. Fleischer visited the enclave in July.” 2 million people are crammed into 14% of the territory.”
Despite Immense Challenges, WFP Continues to Assist Gazans
With continuous evacuation orders forcing WFP to uproot food distribution sites, precise targeting of the most vulnerable groups becomes challenging. We provide ready-to-eat food, hot meals and nutrition support to breastfeeding women and small children.
Mohammed was severely injured in the conflict but all efforts to evacuate him for medical treatment failed. His family fully depends on food from WFP to survive.
“We support partners in almost 80 kitchens, where they cook meals, pack and distribute them to people in camps,” Fleischer explains. She previously visited Gaza last December. “Then, it was really about how do we bring food in – that’s still very much the case,” she says. “Now, at least we have a dedicated WFP operation on the ground.” Our main accomplishment? “We have helped prevent full-scale famine from happening,” she says.
There are currently nearly 500,000 people at IPC5/Catastrophe, the highest grade of food insecurity on the global standard for measuring food insecurity – down from 1.1 million people earlier this year.
Fleischer is keen to highlight the positive impacts of humanitarian supplies making it through.”Right now, we don’t bring enough food into Gaza,” she says. “We don’t bring in what we plan for the month because we don’t have enough crossing points open. We need all the crossings open and at full capacity.”
“Operations are super complicated,” Fleischer says. “We work in a war zone. Roads are destroyed. We are waiting hours at checkpoints for green lights to move.”
WFP, she stresses, also works to support the wider humanitarian community. “We are leading the Logistics Cluster (the interagency coordination mechanism) and supporting partners to bring in their goods through the Jordan corridor. We are receiving their goods in the north at the Zikim crossing point. We’re helping them in Kerem Shalom. So, of course, we’re helping with fuel supplies too.”
Nowhere Is Safe in Gaza
“Gazans cannot get out, and they’re asking to get out,” Fleischer says. “They’re beyond exhausted. There is no space – one makeshift tent after the other up to the sea. Streets are teeming with people.” Meanwhile, the breakdown of sewage systems, lack of water and waste management means diseases, such as Hepatitis A which is spreading among children, are allowed to fester.
Children eat fortified biscuits from WFP at a makeshift camp in southern Gaza.
“We are lucky that nothing has happened to our amazing staff – more than 200 UNRWA staff have been killed,” she says. “That is not acceptable.” She adds: “We have amazing security officers who advise management on which risks to avoid, so that we can stay and do our work safely and families can access our assistance safely. But the risks are high. Very high. We have bullets close to our convoys. We’re there repairing roads. We’re there moving with our trucks. We’re there reaching people. And it’s very dangerous.”
On the path to recovery, the private sector has a role to play, says Fleischer – take the reopening of shops. “If you think of a lifeline, of hope, or a sense of normalcy, it’s surely when the staple bread is back in the market,” she says of bakeries that have reopened with WFP support. “Bakeries need wheat flour, they need yeast, and diesel too – and that’s where we come in.”
High Prices Keep Basic Foods Out of Reach for Most Gazans
In the south of Gaza, “basic food items are slowly re-emerging in food markets. You can actually find vegetables, fruits in the markets but because prices are high, they remain out of reach for most,” she says “And in any case, people don’t have cash. There are no jobs. Even our own staff tell us, ‘We have a salary, but we can’t access cash’.”
Fleischer is keen for humanitarian efforts to reach a stage where people “stop eating things they have been eating for the past nine months” – to diversify diets heavily dependent on canned food (provided by WFP) and whatever people can get their hands on.
“This level of destruction I’ve never seen.”
Fleischer’s biggest fear for Gaza is “that there is no end to this . That we continue with ever less space for the people who already have nowhere to go back to. Even if they moved back to the north, where could they go?”
“Everything is flattened. There are no homes, it’s all destroyed. We need a long ceasefire that leads to peace so we can operate.”
After the Rafah incursion, many people returned to Khan Younis but there’s no means of living in the area. There are no homes left. Credit: WFP
Fleischer, who has served with WFP in Syria and Sudan’s Darfur Region, adds: “This level of destruction I’ve never seen. Hospitals and clinics are destroyed, food processing plants are destroyed. Everything is destroyed.”
Yet, “There is this never-give-up attitude from the people, from the families we serve,” she says. “I can’t believe children still run to you and laugh with you. They probably see in us hope that there will be an end to all this – a sign they are not forgotten.”
This story originally appeared on WFP’s Stories on August 8, 2024 and was written by the WFP Editorial Team.
The executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, which won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago under his watch, says he will step down at the end of a six-year term heading the world’s largest humanitarian organization
ROME — The executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, which won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, says he will step down at the end of a six-year term heading the world’s largest humanitarian organization.
David Beasley, a Republican, served one term as South Carolina’s governor from 1995 to 1999. In a statement Saturday, Beasley said he will exit his role at the conclusion of his term in April 2023.
“Serving in this capacity has been the greatest joy and deepest heartache of my life,” Beasley said. “Thanks to the generosity of governments and individuals, we have fed so many millions of people. But the reality is we have not been able to feed them all — and the tragedy of extreme hunger in a wealthy world persists.”
Beasley was appointed to the U.N. post in 2017 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump, and was recommended for the job by Nikki Haley, another former South Carolina governor. Haley also served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Trump administration. Beasley succeeded Ertharin Cousin, an American lawyer and former U.S. ambassador.
The World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for fighting hunger and seeking to end its use as “a weapon of war and conflict” at a time when the coronavirus pandemic threatened to exacerbate starvation.
In March 2022, Beasley’s term was extended under the Biden administration for an extra year. In September, he said that when he assumed his role in 2017, only 80 million people around the world were headed toward starvation. But climate problems, the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine increased that number to 135 million.
The Rome-based World Food Program was established in 1961 at the behest of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and has brought aid to multiple crises, including Ethiopia’s famine of 1984, the Asian tsunami of 2004 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010.
Beasley said the process to select his successor has already begun.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that Beasley’s term was extended in March 2022, not March 2021.
The supply and distribution of food and disaster relief items to Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states will soon be facilitated by two separately-managed regional logistics hubs, both based in Barbados. In a region in which extreme weather, US import dependency and regional barriers to trade are ongoing threats to food security, the two facilities* will bring a promise of strengthened regional supply chains and logistics capacities as well as heightened intra-regional trade and efficient distribution of humanitarian assistance in the event of disaster.
Caribbean agriculture and fisheries are disproportionately exposed to climate impacts on weather patterns, air and sea surface temperatures, and freshwater availability— threats that are compounded by the region’s $5 billion food import bill, representing 80% of all food consumed.
According to the United Nations, countries in the Caribbean suffer annual losses from storm damages— measured in in property, crops, and livestock— equivalent to 17% of their GDP.
COVID-19 supply chain impacts and the effect of the war in Ukraine have contributed to a 46% increase in moderate to severe food insecurity in the region between February and August 2022— the highest rate since 2020— leaving 57% of the population struggling to put food on the table.
But there is hope for improved resilience amidst growing global uncertainty.
According to Prime Minister, Mia Amor Mottley, Barbados is ideally placed from a geographic perspective, to serve as a trans-shipment point “from which you can reach multiple countries in both the Caribbean Island chain and in coastal Latin America.”
Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley with Executive Director of the World Food Programme, David … [+] Beasley at the ground breaking ceremony for the World Food Programme/ Caribbean Disaster Management Agency/ Government of Barbados Regional Logistics Hub and Center of Excellence
Bajanpro for World Food Programme
The hubs provide hope for a new intra-regional logistical network that is efficient, continuous, sustainable, and safe, leading to reduced import dependence and improved climate resilience.
Speaking in Trinidad & Tobago in August 2022 at the second regional Agri-Investment Forum, Chairman of the CARICOM Private Sector Organization, Gervase Warner described food security as “a critical issue for our own survival. It is very clear to us we are not going to get help from our colonizers of the past, we are not going to get help from big developing countries. This is our problem for us to address.”
The Barbados/ Guyana Food Terminal
In a statement made during the inaugural Agri-Food Investment Forum and Expo in Guyana in May 2022, Prime Minister Mottley indicated that the Caribbean needs “an efficient supply chain that is safe and secure, and not necessarily one that is driven by imports.”
The Barbados-Guyana food terminal and state-of-the-art abattoir, as provided for under the Saint Barnabas Accord between Barbados and Guyana, will house Guyanese produce for local consumption and serve as a trans-shipment point for exports. The facility could serve as a cushion in the event of shocks that impact food security, while also supporting the regional import substitution program, “25 by 2025” which aims to cut food imports by 25% by 2025.
Guyanese President Mohamed Irfaan Ali shares some of the riches of Guyana’s agriculture sector with … [+] Caribbean leaders. Seen here are Prime Minister Keith Rowley of Trinidad & Tobago, Easton Taylor-Farrell Premier of Montserrat, Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua & Barbuda, Saboto Caesar Minister of Agriculture St. Vincent & the Grenadines and Pearnel Charles Jr. Minister of Agriculture, Jamaica
Office of the President of Guyana
The launch of the facility could also spur investment in a previously declining segment of the economy.
Over the past few decades, the sizeable economic contribution of sectors such as tourism, have marginalized the agriculture sector, leaving the Caribbean highly dependent on extra-regional food imports. Transportation and import costs have resulted in high food prices, with the Caribbean ranked second highest globally for the cost of a healthy diet and third for an energy sufficient diet.
Consequently, with 80% of food consumed being imported from outside the region, the Caribbean has become highly vulnerable to food systems disruptions and external shocks, with scarce foreign reserves being expended on imported, highly processed foods that have been connected to the region’s high rates of non-communicable diseases. In many cases, large amounts of imported fruits and vegetables could be substituted with locally and regionally grown foods, but intra- regional barriers to trade and logistical and transport issues have prevented the movement of food within the region.
According to Barbados’ Agriculture Minister, Indar Weir, ground is to be broken in early 2023 for the development of the 7-acre facility, which will serve as a food logistics hub and trans-shipment point for produce originating in Guyana— a major agricultural producer in the Caribbean. The facility will also accommodate about 45 containers, land for crop production, a processing and packaging plant, cold storage facilities and a reservoir that will hold 20 million gallons of water.
“It [The Barbados/ Guyana Food Terminal] is aimed at developing an important trans-shipment hub for food here in Barbados to move on to different hotel chains in other Caribbean islands, and to move on to Miami,” said Guyanese President, Irfaan Ali in his feature address at the opening of Barbados’ Agro Fest agricultural festival in May 2022.
Improving logistics performance from the perspective of customs, transport through ports, internal connections, and the provision of advanced logistics services should be well received in the region, as there is massive room for improvement. As a point of reference, it is much easier from both a financial and a logistical standpoint to trade in agriculture products between the Caribbean and the United States than it is to trade identical products within the region.
“With all that you are producing, if we can’t get it to the island chain in a manner that is quick and affordable, then it is of no use,” said Prime Minister Mottley of the necessity for infrastructural improvements to facilitate the intra-regional movement of food.
World Food Programme (WFP)/ Caribbean Disaster Management Agency (CDEMA)/ Government of Barbados Regional Logistics Hub and Center of Excellence
Elizabeth Riley, Executive Director of the Caribbean Disaster Management Agency (CDEMA) has said that “the existing multi-hazard environment in which the region operates has created the need to strengthen the emergency logistics response.”
As the second most hazard-prone region in the world, having suffered over $22 billion in disaster-related damages between 1970 and 2016, effective end-to-end supply chain management of relief assistance is critical for the disaster resilience of the region.
A Regional Logistics Hub and Centre of Excellence, which broke ground in August 2022 at Grantley Adams Airport in Barbados, will operate as a central location for emergency logistics coordination for the English-speaking Caribbean and tracking assets and relief items— including food—in the wake of disasters. Once operational, it will support air and sea operations, and will serve as a prepositioning and response center and trans-shipment point for relief items.
(l-r) Regis Chapman, Country Director at World Food Programme Caribbean Multi-Country Office, … [+] Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley and David Beasley, Executive Director at World Food Programme at the groundbreaking of the Regional Logistics Hub and Center of Excellence
Bajanpro for World Food Programme
The hub, which was developed as a partnership between the World Food Programme (WFP), the Government of Barbados and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), will also serve as a “center of excellence” with the role of strengthening the logistics and emergency response capacities of practitioners in emergency logistics, warehouse and fleet management and last-mile delivery, including targeting and distributing assistance.
There has never been greater urgency for a facility of this kind in the region— climate change has increased the likelihood that the Caribbean will experience a greater proportion of major hurricanes in the years to come.
When category 5 Hurricane Maria struck Dominica in 2019, it resulted in losses amounting to 226% of 2016 GDP. From the perspective of post-disaster economic flows, agriculture was the most significantly impacted sector. Government sources estimated that 80–100% of root crops, vegetables, bananas, and plantains and 90% of tree crops were damaged, with livestock losses estimated at 90% of chicken stocks and 45% of cattle. In addition to damage to farm buildings and equipment, the crop and livestock sectors suffered a total estimated loss of $179.6 million. The fisheries sector was also heavily affected, with 370 vessels being destroyed.
Likewise, in 2017, Antigua and Barbuda sustained half a million dollars in losses to its agriculture sector, while the fisheries sector sustained $0.46 million in losses in the wake of Hurricane Irma.
In August 2022, WFP Executive Director, David Beasley joined the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, CDEMA Executive Director Elizabeth Riley and WFP Country Director of the Caribbean Multi-Country Office, Regis Chapman for the groundbreaking ceremony of the hub.
“Thank you for this extraordinary partnership,” said Mr. Beasley to Prime Minister Mottley. “We know there will be more hurricanes… We don’t see Mother Nature easing down any time soon… This is not about Barbados alone. This is about the entire region.”
Highlighting the constant and growing threat of climate change to the region and the need to deliver assistance to affected people, Prime Minister Mottley said of the logistics hub and WFP-CDEMA-Barbados partnership: “This was just simply meant to be.”
“We have to recognize that no matter how we much money you have in any part of the world no matter how strong you are as a nation or a company you are not immune from certain realities that is why global cooperation and global moral strategic leadership is needed more ever at this point in time,” she continued.
According to the 2015 Notre Dame Global Adaptation Country Index, the Caribbean is one of the least climate resilient regions globally, from the perspective of food security.
In its ranking of 189 countries’ food systems’ resilience to climate change impacts, the index placed St. Kitts & Nevis and Antigua & Barbuda in positions #175 and #177 respectively. The two Caribbean nations were the only countries from the Americas to fall into the bracket of the twenty most climate vulnerable countries in the world, with respect to food.
Of the 14 Caribbean countries accounted for by the index, only two made it into the more climate resilient half of the ranking— these were Trinidad & Tobago, which was in 66th position and Suriname which was in 72nd position out of 189 countries. Jamaica was #99, Barbados was #107, Bahamas was #110, Belize was #115, Guyana was #128, Dominica was also #128, St. Vincent & the Grenadines was #132, Grenada was #133, Haiti was #135 and St. Lucia was #143 out of 189 countries, meaning that there are only 46 countries that have less climate-resilient food systems than St. Lucia.
The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Country Index supports other findings that Caribbean countries are among the most vulnerable in the world to climate impacts.
“The Caribbean islands are right on the front lines of climate change,” urged David Beasley in his address at the ground-breaking of the Regional Logistics Hub.
Over the past seven decades, 511 global disasters have impacted Small Island Developing States, 324 of which occurred in the Caribbean, with damages at a ratio to gross domestic product six times higher than larger countries.
“As hurricanes become more frequent and severe, we need to be fully prepared so that lives are saved, livelihoods are defended and hard-won development gains are protected,” said Mr. Beasley, as he looked over at the future location of the Regional Logistics Hub and Center of Excellence.
UNITED NATIONS — A record 4.7 million people in Haiti are facing acute hunger, including 19,000 in catastrophic famine conditions for the first time, all in a slum controlled by gangs in the capital, according to a report released Friday.
The U.N. World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization said unrelenting crises have trapped Haitians “in a cycle of growing desperation, without access to food, fuel, markets, jobs and public services, bringing the country to a standstill.”
The Cite Soleil district of the capital, Port-au-Prince, where violence has increased as armed gangs vye for control, is facing the most urgent need of humanitarian assistance, they said.
The report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is a global partnership of 15 U.N. agencies and international humanitarian groups, paints a grim picture of escalating hunger in Latin the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country,
The partnership uses five categories of food security, from Phase 1 in which people have enough to eat to Phase 5 in which households have an extreme lack of food and face famine, starvation, death and destitution. The 19,000 people in Cite Soleil are now in the latter group, the report said.
According to the analysis, a record 4.7 million Haitians are in the three worst categories — 2.9 million in “crisis” Phase 3 characterized by gaps in food consumption and acute malnutrition, 1.8 million in “emergency” Phase 4 in which there are large gaps in food consumption, very high acute malnutrition and excess deaths, and 19,000 in “famine” Phase 5.
The report said food security has also continued to deteriorate in Haiti’s rural areas, with several dropping from the “crisis” phase into the “emergency” phase.
The World Food Program and the Food and Argiculture Organization said food insecurity has increased over the past three years and 65% of Haitians “are in high levels of food insecurity with 5% of them in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.”
Haiti has been gripped by inflation and political gridlock that have exacerbated protests and brought society to the breaking point.
Daily life in the country began to spin out of control last month just hours after Prime Minister Ariel Henry said fuel subsidies would be eliminated, causing prices to double. Rising prices have put food and fuel out of reach of many Haitians, clean water is scarce, and the country is trying to deal with a cholera outbreak.
“Harvest losses due to below average rainfall and last year’s earthquake that devastated parts of the country’s south are among the shocks that worsened conditions for people,” U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said.
He said violence, unrest and tensions in Cite Soleil have limited access by humanitarian workers to the district.
“So, we don’t know necessarily how bad it’s getting, although it’s very clear it’s very bad, indeed. And we need to get access to people; we need to make sure that we can get food to people,” he said.
The World Food Program is seeking $105 million for the next six months, while the Food and Agriculture Organization said it urgently needs some $33 million.
Jean-Martin Bauer, country director in Haiti for the World Food Program, said, “We all need to be steadfast and focus on delivering urgent humanitarian assistance and supporting long-term development.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s representative in Haiti, Jose Luis Fernandez Filgueiras, said, “We need to help Haitians produce better, more nutritious food to safeguard their livelihoods and their futures.”
