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Food riots in storm ravaged Haiti
Natural disasters
Published: 25-Sep-2004
By: Alex Thomson
"We don't have anything , we are hungry, we can't take
it"
Unidentified Haitian flood victim
Desperate Haitians fight over food supplies
The United Nations is sending reinforcements to help keep order after rioting in Haiti among people desperate for aid in the wake of Tropical Storm Jeanne.
Desperate survivors have been looting aid trucks and mobbing food distribution points.
The word was out that food was being distributed at a school in Gonaives - the town worst hit by the floods from the tropical storm.
More than 1500 people are now known to have died in the floods and 1600 are still missing. In some areas food is short as is clean drinking water.
So, when UN soldiers handed out supplies at a distribution point they were quickly overhwelmed. It was chaotic. People desperate for food and water fighting to grab what they could.
"We are capable of giving water for 40 thousand people each day and we are going to give also non food items like kitchen sets, because people need that to cook and to prepare food, because the second problem is that people have lost everything, really everything."
Gregory Rondeau, Logistics officer for French Red Cross
Eventually soldiers attempted to clear the crowds with gas, but the effect was only temporary.
The government in Haiti has had no choice but simply to bury the bodies as fast as possible in crudely dug mass graves.
Aid is arriving - but it's not enough and it not getting in here fast enough.
The government now says the top priority is for medicines and antibiotics to combat the expected outbreak of diseases from filthy water which many are now forced to drink.
Years of chronic deforestation made a serious tropical storm into a flash-flood catastrophe here.
Tropical storm Jeanne is now upgraded to a hurricane and could thus be a record fourth hurricane in a year to hit Florida which now lies in her path.
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