Food Security in Haiti is an Urgent Moral Issue

Photo published by World Food Program in their March 13, 2023 article: "GlobalFood Crisis: The 10 Countries Suffering the Most from Hunger"

Food security is a problem that impacts over 3.1 billion people globally. That’s nearly half of the world’s population. While there is an urgent need for global structural reform to tackle the moral failure to ensure that every human being has access to food, we continue the fight community by community. In Haiti, ordinary people cite nutrition as the number one issue, above the very real problems of political instability born of the recently failed government. Food insecurity is the challenge. 

As of 2024, 362,000 people in Haiti are internally displaced and have difficulty feeding themselves.  Food security has been an issue for Haitians for decades now and has only worsened because of political tensions; including trade policies and Haiti’s limited agricultural resources. According to UNSDG (United Nations Sustainable Development Group), gangs control up to 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, which is raising concerns that hunger is being used as a weapon to coerce local populations as well as gangs having control over key routes to the north and south have disrupted the supply of goods, including food.   

There are organizations created to aid Haiti’s massive nutrition issue, however, much more needs to be done to completely resolve the issue. WFP (World Food Programme) has announced that Haiti is in a humanitarian catastrophe that is critically underfunded. As of this year, the World Food Programme has reached 12,700 people with emergency food distributions across grand southern regions. Unfortunately, the number of food insecure people in Haiti has more than tripled since 2016 and a total of 5.7 million Haitians, do not have enough to eat, which is half the population. If this does not highlight the inhumane crisis at hand, I don’t know what will.

The lack of food in Haiti represents a tremendous moral struggle, where politics can turn deadly and, yet, there is a chance to make a genuine difference, one person at a time.

Thank you for reading! This article is submitted by R.I.I.S.E-Haiti leader

Frances Anita Crispin from our Nutrition Team.