The World Food Program says Haiti's third consecutive year of drought has doubled the severely food-insecure population and driven people more deeply into poverty.
The WFP says some 3.6 million Haitians are facing food insecurity, among them 1.5 million people whose situation is deemed severe.
The agency says the main harvest for 2015 was below average, and in some places losses reached 70 percent. WFP notes that agriculture is particularly important in Haiti, where the industry employs half the nation's working population and three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 a day.
WFP Climate Analyst Rogerio Bonifacio says many are placing the blame on the El Nino weather phenomenon.
The World Food Program says it will scale up its food assistance to Haiti to address the country's most critical needs, distributing both food rations and cash to one million people who are affected by the drought.
It says it will also complement the distributions with Cash-for-Assets programs, in which 200,000 Haitians will be paid cash in exchange for work on watershed management and soil conservation projects to improve local infrastructure.
