'Major food crisis' looms in storm-hit Haiti


After the deadly Hurricane Matthew that left catastrophic devastation in the already fragile Haiti, the country now faces "a major food crisis," said Interim President Jocelerme Privert, while accusing the international community of falling short in providing adequate aid for the country's recovery, the BBC news reported on Friday.Privert urged the international community to provide more aid, saying that the total amount of loss from the hurricane "equals the country's entire national budget." Hurricane Matthew struck the island in early October, killing approximately 1,000 people, leaving about 1.4 million in need of humanitarian assistance and damaging many health facilities. The storm largely destroyed much of the southwestern region's already meager water and sanitation infrastructure, leaving it ripe for a cholera outbreak, experts say.The country launched a massive cholera vaccination campaign to battle a flare-up after Hurricane Matthew, but concerns remain about the capacity for longer-term improvements to the water and sanitation infrastructure needed to eradicate the disease.The cholera campaign, launched in the two southern areas hammered by the storm, is aiming to be the world's largest, targeting 820,000 people, said Ernsly Jackson, an immunization specialist for the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) Haiti. Haiti has been battling a cholera outbreak that has affected more than 800,000 people and killed about 9,000 since 2010, when the bacteria was imported into the country by a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers.