A senior UN humanitarian official said on Thursday that over a million people in Haiti are facing food insecurity as a result of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Hurricane Sandy ploughed through the Caribbean nation before wreaking havoc along the east coast of the United States earlier this week.
The head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ (OCHA) operation in Haiti, Johan Peleman, said that relief workers are still consolidating data of the destruction caused by the storm and a full picture of the situation will take some time.
Meanwhile, he noted, between 15,000 and 20,000 people have seen their houses completely destroyed, damaged or flooded as a result of the storm.
OCHA is particularly concerned because Haiti had been hit by a long period of drought this year as well as by another hurricane, Isaac, which hit the impoverished country in August.
“Now with this new tropical storm, we fear that a great deal of the harvest which was ongoing in the south of the country may have been destroyed completely,” Peleman said in an interview with UN Radio.
“Already, the drought and the previous storm had hit the northern part of the country very badly and we had seen the levels of food insecurity rise there.”
He added. “With the south being hit now, we are going to face in the next couple of months very serious problems of malnutrition and food insecurity.”
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