Port - au Prince, Haiti - Marie Bolivar, a woman with grey hair with a rapeuse voice, overwrites peanut paste for sandwiches sold by the road for 12 cents each. Today the pulp is thinner, because the price of peanuts jumped 80 percent.
However, Bolivar, 60, says she is still struggling to feed her four children and pay the rent. "I can't survive like this", she said one recent afternoon as she stacked peanuts freshly crushed on a small plateau in plastic.
Food prices are not new in Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere West and heavily dependent on imports. Now that prices are increasing once again, global trends, while the price of the essence of mirroring has doubled to $5 per gallon. Haitians are pay more for basic staples that much of Latin America and the Caribbean, finds a survey by the Associated Press.
More than half of Haiti 10 million people live with less than 2 dollars a day, and hundreds of thousands depend on documentation. Malnourished children are easy to spot by the orange colour in hair. "Haitians have less room to increase their spending on food,", said Myrta Kaulard, country Director of Haiti to the United Nations World Food Programme. "It is a serious problem."
Bolivar is one of the many people facing as providers of the edge of the road. They are are pressed from both ends - rising prices and customers with less to spend.
It is ironic to hear the Bolivar to say "All that was much easier than last year," when it is a year Haiti just has endured an earthquake that has killed 300,000 people and devastated large parts of the capitalPort - au Prince. What it means is that the food was much cheaper then because emergency supplies being rushed in.
But, as assistance scales back operation and market reasserts itself, prices are soaring again. Last month a cab strike in protest against the increase in the price of gasoline, but it fizzled because the pilots were so desperate for rates.
A little good new was the price of rice, the staple food in Haiti. Pushed down by free food shipped in after the earthquake, he fell to $0.92 per kilogram in September, in January, climbed $ 1.38 and then began to fall, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
But corn, cost $0.68 per kilogram before earthquake of Earth, is almost double the price in March.
Revenues did not increase, however. The minimum wage is $ 5 per day, but most Haitians do not have a job that would pay this minimum. Thus, they face such as Bolivar, through "degaje", a Creole term meaning "do."
It also depends on where they shop. In a high range grocery store, a kilogram of white rice can cost as much as $3.03. But markets close streets after dark of the night, leaving customers depends on supermarkets.
Nature and the outside world have taken their costs. Erosion, deforestation, flooding and storms make it difficult to tropical agriculture. U.S. imports are a stiff competition for farmers. Haiti imports almost all of its food, including more than 80 percent of its rice, known here as "Miami rice" A whole chicken costs $8 in Haiti - double the price in the Peru. Argentines earn much more Haitians, but pay less for a kilogram of rice.
The rise of garment factories in the towns since the 1970s bare hands of workplace campaigns. Bolivar is among those who have moved here. She lives in a small block House in a slum in the relatively affluent city of Pétion-Ville.
"Nothing for me in the campaign," said.
The winding down of quake aid in part aims to encourage the survivors of the earthquake to leave their camps and stabilize the market price. Groups such as the WFP launched cash-for-work programs, school meals to ensure the presence and efforts for workers from the aid for the purchase of products locally.
But for Bolivar, it is the cost of living that overshadows everything. She said that she usually eats only once a day. One of his sons had to drop out of school because she had to $69 for two months of her schooling.
Help a girl to her earnings as a waitress in a popular Lebanese restaurant class and foreign aid workers moneyed of Haiti.
Bolivar said that she hoped situation will improve in Michel Martelly, the musician elected President March 20. "We are waiting for all the promises, there," said Bolivar. "People want business." Some jobs. People want to eat. ?
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