The World Food Programme’s updated food security assessment for Haiti in late 2022 found that approximately 4.7 million people — more than 40 percent of the population — were facing acute food insecurity, with the number continuing to rise as the compounding effects of gang violence, fuel shortages, inflation, cholera, and political crisis deepened the humanitarian emergency. The figure represented a dramatic deterioration from already alarming levels at the start of the year.
The most severe food insecurity was concentrated in areas directly affected by gang violence and in the communities hosting those displaced by the conflict. In some Port-au-Prince neighborhoods under gang control, food markets had ceased to function entirely, with residents unable to access food for purchase and humanitarian organizations unable to deliver assistance due to security constraints. The WFP described conditions in these areas as approaching the catastrophic threshold of famine classification.
The cholera outbreak added a specific nutritional dimension to the food crisis. Diarrheal illness caused by cholera infection depleted nutritional reserves rapidly, making already malnourished individuals more susceptible to severe disease and death. The intersection of acute food insecurity and active cholera transmission created a particularly dangerous public health and humanitarian situation.
The WFP’s appeal for funding to scale up food assistance in Haiti was significantly underfunded relative to assessed needs, with the global competition for humanitarian resources working against a country whose chronic crisis generated less donor urgency than acute sudden-onset disasters. Haiti’s food emergency was no less severe for being ongoing rather than sudden, but the international humanitarian funding system consistently responded less generously to protracted crises than to discrete disaster events.