WFP VAM Bulletin, February 2024: Food Security Analysis

This WFP VAM Bulletin covers February 2024. After households nationwide saw a brief improvement in January 2024 (63 percent with insufficient food consumption, down from a record 71-72 percent at the end of 2023), the situation deteriorated again in mid-February, with about 440,000 more people affected, bringing the total to roughly 7.8 million people. West (69%), Grande'Anse (67%), Centre (67%) and Nippes (65%) departments were most affected. The January improvement was linked to end-of-year remittances and food gifts and a drop in food inflation from 35 percent (August 2023) to 28 percent (December 2023), but protests and roadblocks in early 2024 disrupted transport and reversed the trend.

In the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, 1.6 million people (71 percent of households) had insufficient food consumption in January, though the situation deteriorated at commune level from December to January in Cite-Soleil (82 percent), Port-au-Prince (81 percent), Croix-des-Bouquets (72 percent) and Petion-Ville (67 percent), with emergency/crisis coping strategies rising to 63 percent, among the highest rates recorded since September 2022. Separately, satellite imagery analysis found nearly 3,000 hectares of cropland abandoned in 2023 in the Artibonite rice plain, concentrated on the eastern side of route RN1 where insecurity has intensified since 2018, with intensified violence recorded after July 2022 and nearly fifty fatalities in a single day in early November 2022; in communes where cropland was abandoned (Dessalines, Petite-Riviere-de-l'Artibonite, Verrettes), nearly one in three households reported being directly affected by armed violence in 2023 versus 12 percent in 2022, and insufficient food consumption in those areas rose 17 percentage points between 2022 and 2023.