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UN agency reaches 320,000 people with food in Haiti

Xinhua, November 3, 2016 Adjust font size:

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that since Hurricane Matthew struck nearly a month ago, the World Food Programme (WFP) has reached more than 320,000 people with more than 2,900 MT of food, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters here Wednesday.

"But aid agencies are still struggling to reach some communities by road due to damaged infrastructure," Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

As for the 120-million-U.S. dollar Flash Appea for Haitil, it is now 33 percent funded, the spokesman added.

Haiti is the country that is third most-affected by extreme weather events, according to the Climate Risk Index. Over the last two decades Haiti has been repeatedly hit by a series of severe natural disasters, the worst of which was the devastating earthquake on Jan. 12, 2010.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas ranking 163rd out of 188 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). Its economy has been repeatedly affected by political crises and natural disasters in the last two decades.

More than six years after the 2010 earthquake, Haiti's population of 11 million continues to face humanitarian and development challenges.

Hurricane Matthew killed more than 1,000 people in Haiti when it struck on Oct. 4, leaving more than 175,000 without homes, and over a million more struggling to survive in what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called "absolute devastation."

The United Nations estimates at least 1.4 million Haitians are now in need of urgent assistance as clean water, food, and medicine are in short supply, and an ongoing cholera epidemic threatens to worsen and spread after dozens of cholera treatment centers were destroyed. Enditem