Written by Bill Canny, Catholic Relief Services' Country Representative for Haiti.

Things are grim in Haiti. Villages remain inaccessible. People are scrambling to find boats that can take supplies in to these communities. Gonaives is still under water.

Around 850,000 people have been affected - 423 are dead, another 50 missing. We estimate anywhere from 100,000-200,000 people have had their homes damaged or destroyed. Water distribution systems have been washed away. A hospital in Gonaives destroyed. Schools are opening later this year and there will be fewer students because parents won't be able afford to send their children.

Haiti was already facing huge obstacles prior to Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike. The rising cost of food caused people to take to the streets in protest. The government was ousted. People were getting desperate.

Two-thirds of Haitians make less than a dollar a day. That comes out to an annual income of $300. Back in April we saw the price of food increase to horrific levels. Even in the U.S. you saw companies rationing sales of rice. But in Haiti, where 55 percent of the basic food staples are imported, the numbers were staggering.

You take for example a 50 kilo bag of rice and we saw a 30 percent increase in the price. That cost, unfortunately, gets disproportionately handed down. A person breaks that bag down into a series of smaller bags and tacks on another 5 percent, this happens several times as the rice passes from vendor to vendor, and by the time it gets to the corner street kitchen the person who buys a bowl is paying a 100 percent more than in previous months. The storms are going to exacerbate this even more.

Simple things like road blockages are forcing price escalations throughout the country, especially in places where we haven't been able to reach like Les Cayes and Port-au-Paix. It's all very precarious. When we wanted to purchase locally in Les Cayes we decided a large purchase would upset the market by taking too much out of the supply. We usually buy our food staples to help stimulate the economy, but in this case it was going to exacerbate price increases. When we could not buy in Les Cayes we purchased food in Port-au-Prince.

We'd hoped that the rise in food prices would be offset by a good harvest. That harvest has been largely destroyed. Estimates are as high as crop losses of up to 80 percent in the most heavily hit departments.

We'll just have to go back and work with these farmers to provide some seeds, agricultural tools and expertise. Help them clean up their land. Get another crop in to the ground with the hope that it makes it through the remainder of the hurricane season. We still have a couple of months left to go and all we can do is hope that we don't get hit again.

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