U.N. food agency appeals for $46 million to help 2 million Haitians facing severe hunger

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. food agency is appealing for $46 million for the next six months to help about 2 million Haitians in dire need of food, including 8,500 at the worst catastrophic level of hunger.

The appeal was issued by Lola Castro, the World Food Program’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, who recently returned from Haiti, where escalating gang violence has displaced well over 1 million people and left half the population — 5.7 million people — in urgent need of food.

Two million of them are in the two worst categories in the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading international authority on hunger crises, and 8,500 are in the worst Phase 5 category, she said. That means at least one in five people or households severely lack food and face starvation and destitution.

Haiti is one of only five countries in the world that have people in the Phase 5 category of catastrophic hunger, Castro said, “and it is really dramatic to have this in the Western Hemisphere.”

Gangs have grown in power since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 and are now estimated to control 85% of the capital and are moving into surrounding areas. Haiti has not had a president since the assassination, and the top U.N. official in the country said in April the country could face “total chaos” without funding to confront the gangs..

A U.N.-backed mission led by Kenyan police arrived in Haiti last year to help quell gang violence, but the mission remains understaffed and underfunded, with only about 40% of the 2,500 personnel originally envisioned.

The WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization, is among the U.N. agencies facing funding cuts, mainly from the United States, which provided nearly half of its funding in 2024.

Castro said WFP reached over 1.3 million people this year until March using carryover funds from last year. But the agency is facing a dramatic situation now with food stocks only until July to assist with emergencies, new displacements or hurricanes, she said.

In the past four years, Castro said WFP always had stocks to help between 250,000 and 500,000 people with any emergency.

“This year, we start the hurricane season with an empty warehouse where we have no stocks for assisting any emergency, or we have no cash neither to go and buy [food] locally if it was possible in some areas, or to do a rapid humanitarian response,” Castro said. “We are very concerned that a single storm can put hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti again into humanitarian catastrophe and hunger.”

WFP normally provides a meal every day for around 500,000 school children, but that number will be cut in half without additional resources, she told a video news conference on Tuesday.

With $46 million, she said, WFP will be able to help the 2 million Haitians in most need of food, keep providing school meals for half a million children, and provide social protection for very vulnerable people in camps for the displaced.

Haiti must not be forgotten as the world deals with other crises, Castro said, urging donors to be generous.

“We really need to stop this and to hold the line on hunger,” she said. “We continue calling the humanitarian community to provide support.”

Lederer writes for the Associated Press.