Haiti food aid lags while hunger deepens

“Life is even more difficult than it was in April,” said Pierre Antoinier St.-Cyr, who works in agricultural development in Les Cayes. “Community organizations are meeting weekly to see if they are going to start the protests again.”

The April riots spread from the countryside to Port-au-Prince and left at least six Haitians and a U.N. peacekeeper dead. The prime minister was dismissed in their wake, and he still hasn’t been replaced.

They also caused an outpouring of international pledges. The U.S. government and U.N. World Food Program promised a combined total of $117 million this year in food and agricultural aid.

That included more than 40,000 tons of beans, rice and other food intended to quell the emergency. But a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) report obtained by The Associated Press says that as of early July, less than 2 percent of that had been distributed.

Some 16,000 tons has reached Haiti. But more than 11,000 tons of that is still in port; nearly all the rest lies undistributed in World Vision International and Catholic Relief Services warehouses. Only 724 tons of food has reached distribution centers.

Haiti already had a customs bottleneck in its ports as officials cracked down on drug smuggling and tried to better collect duties.

In the Artibonite Valley, aid workers say not a single ration had arrived as of mid-July. Nor had any of the $150,000 in emergency seeds and tools promised to help 20,000 Haitian farmers nationwide plant basic food crops.

Hunger is a bitter irony in the valley known as “Haiti’s rice bowl,” where farms have been in decline for decades, unable to compete with subsidized U.S. food imported under low tariffs. Political instability has left the government without effective agricultural policies or ways to deal with nearly annual hurricanes and floods.

That meant there was no protection when the price of imported rice increased by more than 60 percent, and that of corn by 91 percent, over the first six months of the year, according to the World Food Program.

The U.N. agency and many countries’ programs are focused largely in urban areas. Brazilian soldiers have distributed rice, beans and cooking oil donated by their country in the seaside slum of Cité Soleil, where sprawling shantytowns are home to thousands of refugees from the impoverished countryside.

In rural communities where USAID food is slated to be distributed by World Vision International, delivery has been hampered by logistical problems and high fuel prices — which topped $6 a gallon in Haiti in June.

Nearly everything that has been distributed has gone through Catholic Relief Services, which has been relying on pre-existing stocks, said country representative Bill Canny.

World Vision country director Wesley Charles blamed USAID for its delays in delivering food, saying U.S. funding was held up in Congress’ emergency supplemental appropriations bill as lawmakers debated the portions that fund the Iraq war.

“I think that at the USAID level, they need to be more sensitive,” Charles said. “You cannot manage an emergency situation like a normal procedure.”

The U.S. Embassy said there were also delays during the handover of the food distribution and agricultural projects to World Vision from its previous operator, Save the Children. It referred questions about distribution to those agencies.

Canny said U.S. food aid is also often slowed because it consists of excess food from American producers that must be purchased, transported and shipped, rather than bought locally in Haiti.

World Food Program spokesman Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri said it’s complicated to get food into Haiti, and that his agency is focusing on urban areas that are easiest to reach.

“We’re trying to help as much as we can, but that doesn’t mean we’ll solve everything,” he said.

When AP journalists visited the Artibonite Valley in June, farmers hacked at the soil using the same hand-planting methods employed centuries ago by their enslaved ancestors. Lemare Forrestal, a 60-year-old farmer in the mountains, said his family sometimes resorts to eating corn and bean seeds.

“We have kids we can’t feed. We have to eat what we have,” he said.

(Associated Press)

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