food and fuel prices, exceptionally bad weather conditions and a major decline in international trade due to the global economic crisis.

On January 12th, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. It was the most powerful in over 200 years, causing thousands of Haitians to be killed, injured, homeless or displaced and inflicting tremendous infrastructural damage to the water and electricity infrastructure, roads and ports systems in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and its surrounding areas. What is more, although the hurricane season was not particularly destructive in 2010, Haiti was struck by a cholera epidemic in October. Until now, about 230,000 cases were reported, resulting in about 4,500 deaths. As of February 2011, about 3,000 patients per week were admitted for hospitalisation, as opposed to 10,000 at the November peak. USAID/OFDA believe that the disease will most likely be present in the country for the next years. Few months after the disaster, the human toll was extremely severe: 2.8 million people were affected by the earthquake, causing 222,570 deaths, and 300,572 injuries.<sup>2,3</sup> Over 97,000 houses were destroyed and over 188,000 were damaged. 661,000 people moved to non-affected regions.

Before the earthquake, poverty reaches very high levels in Haiti, with more than half of the population living in extreme poverty (i.e. with less than US$1 a day). Most of these approximately 4.5 million destitute lived in rural areas (about 70%) while the others lived in the metropolitan and other urban areas. Moreover, not only was extreme poverty widespread, but it was also severe. Income was among the most unequally distributed in the world: according to the 2001 Household Living Condition Survey, 20% of the poorest got 2% of total income while 20% of the richest got 68% of total income.

Multidimensional poverty was also far-reaching: social indicators such as literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality and child malnutrition showed that poverty was allencompassing in Haiti. Around 4 out of 10 people could not read and write, nearly half of the population had no access to health care and more than four-fifths had no clean drinking water.<sup>4</sup> According to the 2009 national nutrition survey, chronic malnutrition (stunting) affected from 18.1% (Port au Prince) to 31.7% (Plateau Central) of 6-59 month old children. Chronic malnutrition had to be linked with low access to basic public services (health, education, running water, sanitation) and there was evidence that the extremely poor had much less access to services than their non-poor counterparts (World Bank, 2006). As a consequence, the under-five mortality rate was twice the regional average and life expectancy was about 18 years shorter than the regional average. Malnutrition also had to do with food insecurity in a country where food consumption was the main type of expenditure for Haitian households, so that they stood defenseless when faced with price fluctuations. In 2000, food consumption made up for 55.1% of the households' real consumption (IHSI, 2001), with stark contrasts between areas (64.2% in rural areas and 50.2% in urban ones). What is more, the food-dedicated budget coefficients were much higher for poorer households and also remained fairly high for richer rural households

> 2 Source: United Nation Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

> 3 Kolbe et al. (2010) estimated that 158,679 people in Port-au-Prince died during the quake or in the six-week period afterwards owing to injuries or illness.

> 4 According to the Household Living Conditions Survey (HLCS), 2001.

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