OANAMINTE, Haiti – Khaki and blue school uniforms swirl around the schoolyard Monday afternoon at the Foix et Joie School in rural northeastern Haiti as hundreds of children run around after lunch.
In front of the principal’s office, a tall man wearing a baseball cap stands in the shade of a mango tree.
Antoine Nelson, 43, is the father of five children who attend this school. He’s also one of the small farmers who grow the beans, plantains, okra, papaya and other produce served here for lunch, and he came to help with food deliveries.
“I sell what the school provides,” Nelson explained. “That’s an advantage for me as a parent.”
Nelson is one of more than 32,000 farmers across Haiti whose produce is sent to the United Nations agency, the World Food Program, to be distributed to local schools.
Farmers work together to feed an estimated 600,000 students each day.
Their work is part of a change in the way the World Food Program operates in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
In addition to importing food to crisis-hit areas, UN agencies have also worked to strengthen cooperation with local farmers around the world.
But in Haiti, this change has been particularly rapid. Over the past decade, the World Food Program has gone from sourcing no school meals within Haiti to sourcing approximately 72 percent locally. The aim is to reach 100% by 2030.
During the same period, the organization’s local procurement of emergency food aid also increased significantly.
This year, however, new hurdles loomed. During the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the United States cut funding to the World Food Program.
The agency announced in October that Haiti alone faces a $44 million funding shortfall over the next six months.
And the need for support continues to grow. Gang violence has cut off public services, closed roads and forced more than a million people to flee.
As of October, a record 5.7 million Haitians were facing “severe levels of hunger,” which is higher than the World Food Program can achieve.
“Needs continue to outstrip resources,” Haiti program director Wanja Kahlia said in a recent statement. “We simply don’t have the resources to meet all of our growing needs.”
But for Nelson, support efforts like the school lunch program were a lifeline.
He remembers the days before his involvement, when he couldn’t afford to feed his children breakfast or pay for their school lunches.
“The children didn’t listen to the teacher because they were hungry,” he says. “But now, when the school gives them food, they do everything the teacher says. That helps the kids get into school.”
Now, experts are warning that some food aid programs could disappear if funding continues to dwindle, potentially setting back the clock on efforts to empower Haiti’s farmers.
