Cap-Haïtien and Baie-de-Henne, Haiti – Haiti is experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises in its recent history: 5.8 million people face acute food insecurity and more than 1.4 million have been displaced by violence. In the northwest of the country, many families seek to survive by cultivating the land and raising animals, but poverty, lack of resources and the threat of new droughts put their crops at risk. As humanitarian organizations try to contain the emergency, Haitian farmers fear that producing food will become increasingly difficult.

First modification: 09/02/2026 - 21:48

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Just leaving the Hugo Chávez Airport in Cap Haitien, the welcome offered by Haiti's second city, in the north of the country, is a shocking panorama: kilometers and kilometers of coastline filled with streams of garbage. Between the garbage dump, columns of smoke rise from those who set fire to their waste and the erratic movement of the rats can be seen.

On that same beach that borders the coast towards the center of the city, there is a noisy and chaotic local market, where people buy and sell food in extremely unsanitary conditions, with all kinds of waste that undermines the dirt floor.

On one side of the market, on the road known as Cap-Haïtien Boulevard, you can see white vans passing by with the blue logo of the UN World Food Program (WFP), one of the main international organizations on the ground that is addressing the deep humanitarian crisis that the nation is going through.

In fact, Haiti faces one of the worst food insecurity crises in Latin America and the Caribbean: 5.8 million people are acutely food insecure, that is, 52 percent of the population. According to the UN, those who suffer the most from hunger are women, children and displaced families.

In the words of Wanja Kaaria, director of WFP in Haiti, “needs continue to exceed resources,” a situation that has worsened in recent years for two main reasons: the forced displacement of nearly 1.5 million people, recently documented by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), attributed to armed violence by gangs, and to another extent, “to poor agricultural production,” which, for this year, may collapse due to the intense droughts of the El Niño phenomenon.

Read alsoHaiti on the brink of collapse: hunger, violence and a country out of control

Flee violence, survive with agriculture

Traumatized by the daily experience of shootings, homicides and extortion by the gangs that control around 90 percent of Port-au-Prince and its metropolitan area, hundreds of thousands of families chose the northwest of Haiti as a new life destination to be as far away as possible from the capital's violence.

One of the farmers who changed market places was Premise Desarmour. Tired of the extortion at the gang members' checkpoints, she decided to move her sales post to the town of Mare Rouge, more than 250 kilometers away, where she currently sells her harvest, albeit at prices almost four times lower than those she used to sell in the capital: "What forces us to sell here in Mare-Rouge is the problem of insecurity in Port-au-Prince. Unfortunately, in Port-au-Prince we sold the products at higher prices and here at lower prices, almost like if we were giving them away, because the market is saturated.”

The low profitability of his harvest discourages Premise. An agricultural effort to get out of poverty that, in addition to it, affects their country so much. According to the World Bank, Haiti remains the most impoverished country in the region, with 58.5 percent of the population living below the national poverty line, with about a third living on less than $2.15 a day.

To combat this poverty, Premise's husband preferred to migrate irregularly six years ago to the United States, from where he sends remittances whenever he can. Since then, accustomed to being alone and without an internet network at home, Premise has never stopped working the land that belongs to both of them. But to balance her finances, in addition to growing and harvesting food, such as green bananas, coconuts and vegetables, she decided to become a veterinary technician.

Its objective was to reduce the premature death of goats, the animals that swarm in all Haitian towns, both rural and urban. It is one of the main proteins in the diet of the Caribbean nation.

However, Premise did not have the means to pay for training of this type, so she joined the training offered in Cap-Haïtien by the NGO Heifer International, another of the many humanitarian organizations that support women farmers to combat hunger.

Currently, Premise visits goat owners in their community who have health problems. In one of his consultations, one of his neighbors brought him an unappetizing goat. In front of the animal, Premise crouched down to inspect its mucous membranes, where he determined a possible picture of anemia.

Under the blazing sun of Baie-de-Henne, Premise took out of her bag a disposable injection and a bottle of vitamin B complex, with which she stimulated the animal. He injected the orange liquid onto its back: “I asked the lady to bring the goat back to me in a few days so I can monitor its progress and evaluate how well it is responding to the treatment.”

Premise assures that currently "there are fewer animals that die in this area. And the animals that previously had difficulty reproducing are now having more offspring and there is greater production."

For the consultation, Premise charged her neighbor $4, $2 for the medications and $2 for herself. A way to compensate for the low sales of its food harvest, within the framework of the El Niño Phenomenon of 2026-2027.

Read alsoIn Haiti and 12 other areas, extreme hunger is intensifying: UN

The threat that comes with the El Niño drought

Among the residents of Premise are Palmy Igles and Thérèse Augustin, both over 60 years old. In the case of Palmy, his banana crops are currently requiring constant irrigation of water, at least every two or three days: "When it rains, we don't have to worry about watering the crops. Even if it doesn't rain every day, the soil remains moist and we can wait up to two weeks before irrigating it again. But in the dry season, if we don't water it, we can lose the entire crop," says Palmy.

With El Niño forecast to extend drought periods in Latin American and Caribbean countries until March 2027, the nations most vulnerable to these climate changes are the most likely to suffer devastating consequences. In Haiti, fear increases when the northwest of the country already suffers from desert and eroded soils.

In the case of Thérèse Augustin, her fruit trees would be in serious trouble if they did not have the water support of an irrigation system that was financed by the NGO Heifer for several years. It is a network of pipes installed with the support of Heifer that brings water for consumption, irrigation and livestock to communities in Baie de Henne. Infrastructure benefits those communities; The problem is that Haiti's need for agricultural water is much greater.

In front of a papaya tree, Thérèse angles her machete to carve a dirt channel, while her assistant connects the tubes so that the water collected in a reservoir irrigates the roots: "This water system has been a blessing for us. Before they built it, we had to walk a lot to fetch water. We had to collect water from small springs, using leaves to channel the slow drip into our buckets," says Thérèse.

Now, with reduced rainfall due to El Niño, farmers in northwest Haiti like Premise, Palmy and Thérèse fear that their crops will fail in a matter of months and that the lack of food and water will also worsen the situation for their animals.

In a country where millions of people already face food insecurity, Haitian farmers not only depend on the aid that comes from the United Nations and humanitarian organizations that support the agricultural sector. They also hope that the next government, whose election process is expected to begin in December, after more than a decade of political instability, can restore the security of the communities, contain gang violence and respond to the needs of a population hit by displacement, hunger and poverty.

Read alsoEl Niño phenomenon threatens crops in dry locations in Haiti

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