Key Message Update: Escalating insecurity in Port-au-Prince and Artibonite worsening household food and income

This Key Message Update covers December 2024. Gang attacks in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area (ZMPP) and Artibonite continued to worsen, particularly in Cité Soleil and the commune of Petite-Rivière. The uptick in gang violence since November restricted movement, cut income-earning opportunities for poor households and displaced more than 21,400 people in the first 17 days of December according to IOM, so widespread Crisis (IPC Phase 3) outcomes persist with Emergency (IPC Phase 4) in Cité Soleil; internally displaced people in ZMPP settlement sites, facing precarious conditions, and pockets of very poor households in Ouest, Nord-Ouest and Grand'Anse also face Emergency outcomes.

Violence was particularly deadly: the massacre led by the gang leader known as Mikanor at Wharf Jérémie in Cité Soleil killed at least 207 people between 6 and 11 December according to BINUH, and in Petite-Rivière, after a joint operation by the Haitian National Police and the Multinational Security Support Mission against the Gran Grif gang, the gang launched attacks on 13 December and killed 70 people. This surge damaged poor households' income sources, disrupted market functioning and supply, and impeded food assistance distribution.

In the most insecure areas, particularly the ZMPP and Petite-Rivière, market access has become increasingly constrained by financial barriers, including the impossibility of withdrawing cash from banks and money transfer houses that lack liquidity, and by the difficulty of pursuing typical income-earning activities. Floods in Nord, Nord-Ouest, Sud and Grand'Anse since late November and early December damaged croplands and caused casualties, including 10 deaths and six missing. In Grand'Anse, 6,000 farmers and 500 livestock herders were affected according to OCHA.

In the worst-affected areas of Nord and Nord-Ouest more than 80 percent of bean, sweet potato and banana farms in the plains were destroyed, with bean crops particularly hit in Nord-Ouest; over 80 percent of Congo pea crops in the Grand Sud, normally harvested from late November to January, were destroyed, and in Grand'Anse, particularly Anse d'Hainault, Dame-Marie and Chambellan, about 75 percent of plains farms were destroyed.