Starvation stalking rural Haitian children

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Some Haitian children are seeing chronic malnourishment and even starvation in some areas due to the effects of four major windstorms, residents say.

International aid workers and doctors last month airlifted 46 children on the brink of death from Haiti's Baie d'Orange region to hospitals in Port-au-Prince, with the emergency intervention coming after word arrived that 26 children had died from severe malnutrition, The Miami Herald reported Monday.

The crisis in Haiti's countryside is less visible than the poverty apparent in Port-au-Prince, the newspaper said. But in a region where enough food once could be grown to sustain the population despite widespread deforestation, the four successive storms, which devastated Haiti in less than a month this summer, have ruined meager crops.

"Before, people didn't have a lot of money but they lived because the soil used to produce a lot of food," Mecene Jules, 50, told the Herald. "There were potatoes, pigeon peas, all in large quantities. Now, with all of these hurricanes, what's left of the soil has washed away."

"What's happening in Baie d'Orange is the result of poor political decision-making that has happened over several years," Fednel Zidor, government delegate for southeastern Haiti, told the newspaper.