Touch down in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Published: Monday, 28 April 2008, 6:40PM
By James Mates
Port au Prince, Haiti. 25th April 2008
Haiti is listed by the IMF as the 133rd poorest country on earth (out of 179) and five minutes out of the airport you are quite prepared to believe it. Here’s a people who live with nothing, literally nothing. It’s not that they don’t have things like you and I have things. They don’t have anything.
Oxfam reckons that people as poor as the Haitians spend between 50 and 80 per cent of the money they earn on food, just on keeping themselves and their families alive.
In the last few months that figure has gone closer to 100 per cent, for many here in Haiti well over 100 per cent. That’s why ITV News has come to Haiti.
This country is facing a most unusual form of famine, caused not by lack of food (because there is plenty) but by the fact a whole section of their society can no longer afford enough food to live on.
According to the World Bank, food prices around the world have almost doubled in the last three years, with much of that increase coming in the last six months alone. Wheat has doubled in less than a year. Rice is up 70 per cent on a year ago. Maize and beans have been pushed up almost as much.
Even those who have been living on food aid are suffering because the aid agencies buy their food on world markets; their budgets - already struggling to cope with high oil prices - are rapidly being exhausted. Indeed the World Food Program has warned that without another $500m from donor Governments soon, a serious disaster awaits.
We are going out with the WFP onto the streets of Port au Prince tomorrow. They’ve warned us there is real desperation out there.
The crisis is already claimed lives with four people dead in food riots early this month, not to mention the nameless, faceless Haitian children whose deaths are either caused or hastened by malnutrition.
The democratically elected Government of Haiti is another victim, brought down by the food riots. Hard won democratic reforms in this troubled country may be also be a casualty of the food crisis.
Travelling with cameraman Tony Hemmings and producer Nat Faye, I shall be on the road for three weeks, flying - literally - around the world, looking at the effects of rocketing food prices and asking, what’s behind them?
I’ll update as regularly as our schedule allows, hopefully every day at least. The first of our reports, from Haiti, is due to air on Monday 28th April on the Evening News and News at Ten. Hope you’ll be watching.
You can track James' progress around the world by visiting out interactive food crisis map.