PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Four tropical storms have wiped out most of Haiti’s food crops and damaged irrigation systems and pumping stations, raising the specter of acute hunger for millions in the impoverished country.
“The system of agriculture has been destroyed,” said Agriculture Minister Joanas Gue. Aid agencies and diplomats also say Haiti desperately needs help.
Emergency aid has flowed in to people directly affected by Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike, storms that triggered flooding and killed at least 425 people in less than a month, including 194 in the critical rice-growing Artibonite Valley.
But the United Nations has raised less than 2 percent of a critical $108 million fundraising appeal, said Stephanie Bunker, a spokeswoman for the world body’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Another $18 million has been pledged but not delivered. And much, much more is needed, with farms damaged or destroyed across the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
“This will take billions of dollars,” said Henrietta Fore, administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Schools that were supposed to open earlier this month are filled with refugees fighting over scraps of food aid. Much of Gonaives, the nation’s fourth-largest city, remains flooded, and diseases are beginning to spread.
“The scope of this is frankly unimaginable in many countries,” said U.S. Ambassador Janet Sanderson. “A lot of the progress of the last couple of years has been swept away by these waters.”
The U.S. government is sending $29 million in food aid and humanitarian assistance, and other countries have airlifted food and clothing. U.N. agencies have delivered food to more than 240,000 people, aided by soldiers of its 9,000-strong peacekeeping force.
Gue says 60 percent of this year’s food harvest was wiped out by the storms, which hit just as farmers were preparing to collect corn, plantains and yams from their fields. The fall rice harvest was lost as well.
