The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared famine conditions present in Haiti on September 30, 2024, with approximately 6,000 people in the most severe category of acute food insecurity — catastrophic hunger involving complete loss of livelihoods, starvation, and death. The declaration was a formal recognition of what humanitarian organizations had been warning about for months: that Haiti’s food crisis had crossed the threshold from emergency to catastrophe.
The famine declaration identified specific communities in Port-au-Prince metropolitan areas, particularly those under prolonged gang siege, as the epicenters of the most severe hunger. In these communities, food markets had ceased to function, humanitarian access was blocked by gang control, and families had exhausted every coping strategy available to them. The 6,000 in famine conditions represented the most acute edge of a broader food security emergency affecting nearly half the country’s population.
The World Food Programme warned that nearly half of all Haitians — approximately 5.4 million people — were facing acute food insecurity, with two million at emergency levels. The food crisis was the direct result of the security crisis: gang control disrupted supply chains, displaced farming communities, prevented humanitarian access, and destroyed the economic activity that enabled families to purchase food.
International donor governments that had been providing humanitarian funding to Haiti were called on to dramatically scale up their support, with the WFP warning that underfunding of the humanitarian response plan was leaving millions of Haitians without assistance. The famine declaration was intended to create urgency among donors who had been responding to Haiti’s chronic crisis with inadequate resources relative to the scale of suffering.