Haiti already had a food crisis. The last thing it needed was looting of food depots

Lorenzo de Matteis, an entrepreneur who gave up a lucrative real estate career in the United States to move back to his native Haiti over a decade ago, was at home in the hills above Port-au-Prince when word arrived that businesses in the vicinity of the seaport were in trouble.

De Matteis, who had been unable to get to his food distribution warehouse for two days because the streets had turned deadly, with blocked roads and stray bullets, turned to his surveillance cameras.

“Even though I was calling for help for the other guys, I had hoped something would happen and they wouldn’t get to me,” he said, referring to calling for the owners of two other food distribution warehouses that were also pillaged last weekend.

What happened next was sheer chaos, de Matteis said, and it went on for 36 hours as more than 50,000 bags of rice, 30,000 bags of flour, 20,000 bags of sugar and more than 50,000 cases of milk were cleared out of his KayZo Distribution warehouses.

“I felt violated. It was chaos, chaos,” he said of the looting of his 30,000-square-foot and 10,000-square-foot warehouses. “When they were looting us, we cried for help and nothing happened.”

While there is not yet an official tally of how much was lost in the pillaging, those victimized say the losses are enormous.

De Matteis estimates that about $10 million worth of food was looted between his business and two others — Liora Food, which was hit first, and Marché Ti Tony, which was hit next.

A fairly new concept in the Haitian marketplace, the food distribution warehouses work similar to a Costco or wholesale grocer. Owners purchase products from importers and then resell to smaller merchants around the country. Together, the three businesses supplied about 30% of the food staples that make up the Haitian diet to markets around the country, and employed close to 500 employees, who are now out of jobs.

“It’s not about the money. It’s about the 13 years of working in such difficult conditions,” said de Matteis, 54, adding that moving back home to Haiti from the United States, where he’s a U.S. citizen and was doing extremely well in real estate, was a conscious choice. “At KayZo, my employees pray in the morning before they go to work. We give the merchants coffee, bread and peanut butter.

“I have a fidelity program where I give back 20 percent of my profits,” he said, emphasizing that his warehouses were more than just an investment. “They buy and they get points so they can get things that they need for their home because these people have nothing. I have a micro-credit program to help them.”

Haiti was already at rock bottom. Now this.

Even before last week’s looting of several businesses amid spiking violence, Haiti was already knee-deep in crises: a crashing economy, eroding domestic currency, anti-government protests, armed gangs, surging kidnappings and violence, and starvation.

The United Nations estimates that more than 40 percent of Haitians, about 4.4 million people out of 11.5 million, are facing food shortages this year, including 1.2 million people considered to be at an emergency level.

Meanwhile, acute childhood malnutrition increased by 61% in the last year because of the combined effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and surging gang violence.

The looting of the businesses will have a ripple effect beyond Port-au-Prince, say business owners and the U.N..

“Haiti didn’t need this,” said Bruno Lemarquis, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Haiti. “There is the immediate impact and humanitarian consequences. But there are also consequences for investors, entrepreneurs who need predictability: Are they going to want to rebuild? Haiti was already at the bottom of global competitiveness rankings. Now with this on top, it might even go further down.”

The World Bank estimates a poverty rate of nearly 60% in 2020 in Haiti, compared to the last official national estimate of 58.5% in 2012. Meanwhile, the country ranked 179 out of 190 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking for last year.

With its economy already in shambles, the country now faces higher food prices, increasing inflation — already in double-digits — and a worsening humanitarian situation.

“Food insecurity numbers, child malnutrition could go up further,” Lemarquis said.

New wave of gang violence

Since June 1, Haiti has been hit by what the U.N. describes as “unprecedented levels” of violence by rival gang fighting. The clashes between gangs, and sometimes with the police, have forced more than 14,000 people in poor neighborhoods to abandon their homes and seek refuge in churches, public plazas and a sports complex.

The violence first spiked along the southern edge of metropolitan Port-au-Prince in the Martissant neighborhood and cut off access to four regions in the south. Weeks later, it erupted at the northern entrance of the capital, along the airport road, and in the neighborhoods of Cité Soleil and Bas-Delmas.

Access to major roads has been blocked and access to healthcare centers and hospitals has also been affected.

In one instance, a camp where hundreds of people with disabilities had been living since the devastating Jan. 10, 2010, earthquake, was burned down by armed men on June 17, a day before the attacks on the food distribution warehouses.

“Every single Haitian I’ve talked to has said, ’This is too much. We don’t recognize our country. Where are our values?’ ” Lemarquis said. “How can a site with people living with disabilities be burnt?”

About 1.5 million people, mostly in the capital but also in the southern peninsula, have been affected by the latest wave of violence, which is also stretching the U.N.’s resources, Lemarquis said.

“For now, we are working with existing resources, key partners and agencies that are able to shift money from here and there,” he said. “We will be strapped for cash, and we need additional resources. Humanitarian access is also an issue, and we are working with national and local partners to reach the displaced.”

Adding to the challenges are the overlapping crises in Haiti.

In addition to the displacements, Haiti is facing a resurgence of the COVID pandemic, is going through a severe sociopolitical crisis and also needs to prepare for the hurricane season. In recent years, U.N. agencies and humanitarian partners have scaled down operations and phased out staff. In other cases, non-governmental organizations have left altogether.

“We need support,” Lemarquis said. “We need urgent reinforcements.”

The U.N., which had launched a $235.6 million Haiti Humanitarian Response Plan in March, is continuing its call for donors to help provide emergency assistance to 214,000 Haitians.

“The big question mark is, does it last for two weeks, does it last for six months?” Lemarquis said of the violence. “We don’t know. This is linked to a broader discussion about the root of the problem and why it is happening.”

One charity still operating in Haiti is Food for the Poor. The Coconut Creek-based group recently launched a $5 million emergency appeal, mostly for food. It operates about a dozen food distribution centers in the country.

“The fact of the matter is, the country’s starving already,” said President/CEO Ed Raine. “We all are sitting here wondering, ‘Well, how bad will it get before it can get better?’ “

Raine equated Haiti’s deteriorating situation and acute food shortage to a natural disaster.

“It is essentially a famine,” he said during a tour of his Coconut Creek warehouse, stocked with canned food for Haiti. “We can see where this is going to play out over the next few months, and it is going to be disastrous.”

Bishop Oge Beauvoir, the charity’s executive director in Haiti, said the gang violence and roadblocks in metropolitan Port-au-Prince have made it risky for contractors and transporters. Once home to famed American dancer Katherine Dunham, Martissant today is increasingly looking like a war zone, with dead bodies lining the streets as heavily armed men keep watch.

“It’s very difficult to get food to those centers for distribution,” Beauvoir said. For people living in the south, “we have food for them but cannot reach out to them. It’s a big issue.”

Fear of civil war

The recent surge in violence and the attacks on businesses are creating panic about where the country is headed.

“We have been experiencing an erosion of our values. Less and less respect for public belongings, less and less respect for human life,” Beauvoir said. “There is [now] another mix, one we didn’t have before: Gangs are fighting each other, people are getting killed. ... Something needs to be done.”

Beauvoir said he fears that Haiti “may be on the verge of a civil war.”

“There is no way that two groups can be fighting each other and there is nobody to intervene. That is very concerning,” he said.

The U.N. estimates that about a third of Port-au-Prince’s territory is now affected by the criminal activity and violence by an estimated 95 armed gangs.

“The situation has worsened over the last five days and will likely continue to deteriorate in the coming weeks, as gangs are expected to fight back to regain territorial control, potentially triggering new population movements,” the U..N. said in a June 22 report.

The business owners whose food warehouses were attacked say they do not know why their businesses were hit, who was responsible or why the police failed to respond to their calls when a Corps of Intervention and Maintenance of Order (CIMO) base is in walking distance.

They have also shied away from making any connections with events that unfolded a day before when a police officer, Gasley Limage, was killed by a gang in the lower Delmas neighborhood. Limage was a member of the specialized CIMO branch.

The killing provoked a counterattack by the police. According to the U.N. report, the police fired tear gas at people taking refuge in a parking lot, forcing them to flee to neighboring areas.

After the police killing, Haiti National Police Chief Leon Charles accused Jimmy Chérizier, a former cop turned powerful gang leader and head of the federated gang group known as the G-9, of killing the officer. Known as Barbecue, Chérizier was sanctioned by the U.S. along with two former Haitian government officials for the 2018 massacre in the La Saline neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.

Earlier this week, appearing in a video with several hooded men armed with machetes and guns, Chérizier declared that he was launching a revolution against Haiti’s political and business elites.

He implied the reason for the looting was because the people are hungry and living in misery.

“We will continue to encourage the population to take what is rightfully theirs,” he said. “It is our money in their banks; it’s our money in their supermarkets, it’s our money in their dealerships.”

At the press conference, Charles painted the gang leader as anything but a revolutionary leader.

“Jimmy Chérizier, Barbecue, was there, in person. He shot the policeman,” Charles said after the police shooting. “The police are in mourning once again because of the action of the bandits who, for two weeks, have attacked and killed the police.”

The only strategy for the Haiti National Police, he said, is “to fight against the bandits.”

In another press conference, Charles said, “The police are your brothers, your friends, your comrades. Bandits are your enemies. They attack. We give them the answer.”

But the day of the warehouse attack, police did not respond, business owners say. As surveillance cameras captured people walking out with bags of rice and flour, they felt violated and defeated.

Giovanni Saieh, the owner of Liora Food, told local radio station Magik 9: “There is nothing left in the food depot, which serves the departments of the south, the north of the country and the capital.”

He had spent more than two decades working, waking up at the crack of dawn to drive downtown. He spent the Monday after the attack in a daze, unsure what to do next. Though President Jovenel Moïse had promised financial support, no one from the government had called.

“We have lost everything. Financially, it’s over. We do not know how we are going to honor our commitments to our suppliers,” he said.

Saieh later told the Herald that while he would like to rebuild, “if the gang situation is not resolved, there will be no way.

“The losses are in the millions of dollars.”