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STORY: UN / HAITI PRESSER
TRT: 03:34
SOURCE: UNIFEED
RESTRICTIONS: NONE
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH / NATS
DATELINE: 25 OCTOBER 2024, NEW YORK CITY / RECENT
FILE - NEW YORK CITY
1. Wide shot, United Nations Headquarters
25 OCTOBER 2024, NEW YORK CITY
2. Wide shot, press room dais
3. SOUNDBITE (English) Waanja Kaaria, Representative and Country Director in Haiti, World Food Programme (WFP):
“5.4 million Haitians, or we can say roughly about half of the population, is suffering from acute hunger. This includes about 6,000 of internally displaced sheltering sites where we have also seen pockets of IPC 5. The IPC 5 level is the highest level, and this is also displayed in famine like conditions. The same report identified a declining malnutrition situation, citing about 270,000 children across Haiti being acutely malnourished.”
4. Wide shot, press room dais
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Waanja Kaaria, Representative and Country Director in Haiti, World Food Programme (WFP):
“Especially dire for young people is the risk of being recruited by armed groups and sliding into criminality. And just to say that recently also, as a result of increasing armed group attacks, tens of thousands have additionally been further displaced internally. And we are seeing that figure doubling just in the last three months, bringing the total number of displaced people to almost 700,000 people.”
6. Wide shot, press room dais
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Lola Castro, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, World Food Programme (WFP):
“This year, we have reached 1.4 million people, but it has not been without a lot of effort. And we are always exploring the ways that we can maintain this access, but always with principles and humanitarian principles on top of it. Just to give you an example, over the weekend, in the area of Solino in Port-au-Prince that is very close to our office, twenty minutes from our office, was attacked and there were thousands of displaced, newly displaced on top of the ones that were there that we are moving in town and WFP we had to really move on and start food distributions, hot meal distributions. And we have already managed to go for 1,500 people on Wednesday. So, it's really very difficult and is an ongoing process. You have to scale up all the time.”
8. Med shot, reporter
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Lola Castro, Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, World Food Programme (WFP):
“The authorities are saying they need more support from the whole international community for the security. We, as World Food Programme we say, while we increase security, we also have not to forget the humanitarian piece and maintaining them separated so that we can continue on having access and not to become a target neither. But also, we can do our job for the most vulnerable.”
10. Wide shot, dais
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Waanja Kaaria, Representative and Country Director in Haiti, World Food Programme (WFP):
“Yesterday, the United Nations Humanitarian Air Services helicopter, you know, was actually hit by gunfire. But just to mention that we managed the helicopter was landed back, landed back at the airport safely, and just to in order to mitigate impact on the humanitarian response, the World Food Program actually has another flight, the fixed wing, that is now going to be deployed to do additional l routes while the UNHAS helicopter is being serviced.”
12. Wide shot, end of presser
The World Food Programme (WFP) said, 5.4 million Haitians, or roughly half of the population of Haiti, is suffering from acute hunger, including some 6,000 at Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) sheltering sites where pockets of Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) 5, the highest level, have been detected.
Talking to reporters today (25 Oct) from Port-au-Prince, the WFP Representative and Country Director in Haiti, Waanja Kaaria, noted that IPC 5 represents “famine like conditions,” although she noted that the same report “identified a declining malnutrition situation, citing about 270,000 children across Haiti being acutely malnourished.”
Kaaria said the food insecurity situation was “especially dire for young people” as they risk “being recruited by armed groups and sliding into criminality. “
She said, recently “as a result of increasing armed group attacks, tens of thousands have additionally been further displaced internally. And we are seeing that figure doubling just in the last three months, bringing the total number of displaced people to almost 700,000 people.”
Briefing from Panama City, the WFP’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Lola Castro, said, “this year, we have reached 1.4 million people, but it has not been without a lot of effort. And we are always exploring the ways that we can maintain this access, but always with principles and humanitarian principles on top of it.”
As an example, she said, “over the weekend, in the area of Solino in Port-au-Prince that is very close to our office, twenty minutes from our office, was attacked and there were thousands of displaced, newly displaced on top of the ones that were there that we are moving in town and WFP we had to really move on and start food distributions, hot meal distributions. And we have already managed to go for 1,500 people on Wednesday.”
Castro said, “it's really very difficult and is an ongoing process. You have to scale up all the time.”
She stressed that “while we increase security, we also have not to forget the humanitarian piece and maintaining them separated so that we can continue on having access and not to become a target neither. But also, we can do our job for the most vulnerable.”
For her part, Kaaria reported that on Thursday, the United Nations Humanitarian Air Services (UNHAS) helicopter, “was actually hit by gunfire.”
She said the helicopter “landed back at the airport safely, and just to in order to mitigate impact on the humanitarian response, the World Food Program actually has another flight, the fixed wing, that is now going to be deployed to do additional l routes while the UNHAS helicopter is being serviced.”
The latest IPC report covers August 2024-February 2025 and was released by Haiti’s Coordination Nationale de la Sécurité Alimentaire (CNSA), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). It provides a common scale to measure the severity and magnitude of acute hunger.
