HAITI - Food, gas prices cripple the poor

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (AP):

Marie Bolivar, a gray-haired woman with a raspy voice, crushes peanuts into paste for sandwiches which she sells by the roadside for 12 cents apiece. These days the paste is thinner, because the price of peanuts has jumped by 80 per cent.

But Bolivar, 60, says she still has trouble feeding her four children and paying the rent. "I can't survive like this," she said on a recent afternoon as she piled freshly crushed peanuts on a small plastic tray.

Soaring food prices aren't new in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and heavily dependent on imports. Now those prices are rising again, mirroring global trends, while the cost of gasoline has doubled to US$5 a gallon. Haitians are paying more for basic staples than much of Latin America and the Caribbean, an Associated Press survey finds.

More than half of Haiti's 10 million people get by on less than US$2 a day and hundreds of thousands are dependent on handouts. Undernourished children are easy to spot by the orange tinge in their hair. "Haitians have less room to increase their expenditures on their food," said Myrta Kaulard, Haiti's country director for the UN World Food Program.