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Food aid reaches Haiti, but many empty-handed

Hundreds of Haitians stood in long lines on Saturday, just as others had walked for hours throughout the week to receive the UN and regional food aid pouring into the country after a spate of deadly riots.

But amid the tenuous calm, aid groups say they are just buying time — and long-term solutions seem remote in the desperately poor nation.

“The beans might last four days,” said Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children who emerged from a churchyard on Friday with small bags of food. “The rice will be gone as soon as I get home.”

Rodman was one of the lucky ones. Many others arrived after the distribution centers had run out.

Haitian officials handed out 1,000 bags of UN-bought food on Saturday in Cite Soleil, a huge seaside slum on the eastern edge of the capital. Though aid was limited to women over age 57 and the handicapped, at least 50 people who waited in line were turned away.

Claudete Depalis, 60, left empty-handed after hoping to get food for the 12 children of extended family who live in her home.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with these kids today,” she said.

More than half of Haiti’s nearly 9 million people live on less than US$2 a day, and the rise in food prices has deepened the country’s misery.

Market stalls are piled with papayas and small bags of pasta, even in poor areas. But vast numbers of people simply lack money to buy them because global food and commodity prices have risen 40 percent over the past year.

At least seven people were killed in the food riots this month that cost Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis his job.

The riots also were a setback to international efforts to stabilize the country, UN envoy Hedi Annabi said.

UN peacekeepers came after a violent rebellion ousted then Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

“We now need to turn this around, draw the lessons from this crisis and move ahead,” Annabi said.

The UN says it will distribute 8,000 tonnes of food and other aid in the next two months. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has pledged more than 350 tonnes of food. And US President George W. Bush has ordered the release of US$200 million in emergency aid to nations hit hardest by surging food prices — though it was not immediately clear how much Haiti would get.

Brazil has given some 18 tonnes of food since the crisis began.
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