Great Hunger: Gang Violence Deepens Haiti’s Food Crisis

Haiti was once predominately covered by forests, but its tree cover has since been reduced to roughly a third. Trees are today cut down for key sources of revenue such as timber, fuel and charcoal, but also to clear space for growing crops. The soil, consequently, has become less fertile and more susceptible to erosion, which leads to disasters like landslides and encourages further deforestation as growers are forced to clear more trees to create new agricultural lands. It is a vicious cycle which, in the end, makes Haiti more vulnerable to ever worsening shocks under the conditions of intensifying climate change. Deforestation is devastating, but, for lots of people in Haiti, it is necessary simply to get by.

The roots of Haiti’s deforestation run far deeper than the immediate crisis, tracing back to the days of European colonialism. The island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, was once home to the Taíno, a people annihilated over the course of only a few decades following Spanish colonizers’ arrival in 1492. By the time the French showed up to establish a colony of their own in the 17th century, the indigenous population had been destroyed to such an extent that the French instead imported huge numbers of African slaves to work the land. Forests were torn down and monocultural plantations were established to produce things like sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton, damaging the land terribly, but allowing France to grow obscenely wealthy.

The Haitian slaves, in 1804, liberated themselves, the first such feat in history, but their triumph did not go unpunished. The French deployed warships to the island in 1825, demanding that the newly independent Haiti compensate them for the loss of the colony and its slave labor. Under the threat of French violence, the new state had no choice but to accept its demands, but the consequent debt was so severe that Haiti was forced to take out loans from French bankers to help pay it off. Thus, the country became trapped in a debt crisis from which it has never emerged, unable to properly develop its economy or infrastructure as revenues are siphoned off to service foreign debts. It is precisely under these conditions of debt bondage that deforestation has been encouraged, with Haiti at one time becoming a major exporter of mahogany, the revenues from which helped to service its debts.

An immediate legacy of French colonialism in Haiti was extreme economic instability, which became one pretext among many for an increasingly imperial United States to invade in 1915. For 29 years, the U.S. directly ruled over Haiti as a profoundly violent military regime, enforcing a system of forced labor and extracting wealth that was then funneled into Wall Street. Haitian development was again severely restricted under America’s racist, murderous regime, meaning that, even after the U.S. technically pulled out in 1934, the conditions for recovery were limited. An ostensibly independent Haiti came to be ruled under the U.S.-backed dictatorships of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and, later, his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, both of whom also plundered the country’s wealth and embezzled up to 80 percent of the development aid that it received from abroad. Unable to escape its debts nor to properly develop its economy, Haiti continued to engage in environmentally damaging practices to generate revenues and many such practices continue to this day.

As damage to the land has made rural life increasingly unviable in Haiti, huge numbers of people have migrated to cities that are unable to support them. Slums have thus developed outside of urban centers, as at the edge of Port-au-Prince, where the massive earthquake that struck in 2010 proved to be particularly catastrophic. A million people were left homeless and an estimated 222,000 died. The sheer devastation of the quake was entirely related to Haiti’s history of imperial oppression, as it is the consequent conditions of underdevelopment and debt bondage that meant so many people were living in these overcrowded, unsafe slums in the first place. Haiti may be geographically vulnerable to climate shocks, but its exploitation by imperial powers is a large part of why it is unable to properly deal with them.

The Haitian state has been so degraded through the years that, today, it can barely endure under the pressures imposed by rising gang violence. Such is the severity of the crisis that, once again, foreign intervention has been called upon, with a U.N.-approved security mission led by Kenya deployed to restore order in 2023. But of the 2,500 law enforcement officers initially planned to be sent in, only 991 had reportedly been deployed by the end of June 2025. The mission, on its own terms, has been a failure, with gang violence undeterred and the political crisis unresolved, but it has since been extended. The U.N. adopted a resolution in September this year to expand the force to 5,500 personnel, which, this time, will also include military troops in addition to police officers. But will this expanded mission do any better? Given the appalling history of foreign military interference in Haiti, there is every reason for concern. Violence has so often been imposed upon the country, but its fundamental economic and governance issues go unresolved.

It is possible that a larger U.N. mission will beat back the gangs. But, at a deeper level, it is unlikely that foreign officers, unfamiliar with Haitian culture and language, will create long-term stability. Haiti’s governing institutions, including its malfunctioning and corrupt police force, must be reformed and reconstructed, while the flow of illegal weapons presently being trafficked in from the United States must be stemmed. These are political problems that a military intervention alone cannot thwart. Much more care and strategy are required, but history has shown how reluctant political elites from all sides have been to do what is necessary. It is the Haitian people themselves who live with the consequences of this perpetual political failure and exploitation. It is they who today go hungry for it.