In Haiti, with two weeks to go before the spring planting season begins, the UN and its partners are rushing to provide tools and seeds to farmers to help avert a national food crisis.
Haitian family tends garden
With many Haitians having migrated to rural areas following January's devastating earthquake, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) finds that many "host families" caring for displaced people are spending their meager savings to feed the new arrivals and using up precious food stocks.
In many cases the poor are resorting to eating the seeds they have stored for the next planting season and eating or selling their livestock, in particular goats.
Alex Jones, FAO's Emergency Response Manager for Haiti just back from Haiti, said the country's food situation was insecure even before January's earthquake.
"It had a major deficit in food production even before the crisis. I don't think we can achieve an ideal situation under the best of circumstances. We can improve the situation and we're working very hard to get as many high quality seeds from local producers into the market as quickly as possible. But our forecast now is that we will still fall short of what we'll need."
Jones says the main problem is funding to buy seeds and other inputs.
FAO has kick-started a small cash-for-work programme cleaning out irrigation canals in Léogâne and the humanitarian organization CARE will work to scale it up in the coming days from 600 to 4 000 people.
As part of the recovery phase, CARE plans to support community-based organizations in activities such as water management, product marketing and capacity building.
Diane Bailey, United Nations
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