Food crisis sparks boat people increase.

Acute hunger and the rising cost of living could send a new wave of boat people from Haiti, where rising food prices set off deadly riots two weeks earlier and drove the prime minister from office, officials and analysts say, reports Reuters (April 24, 2008):

The director for the country's national migration office, Jeanne Bernard Pierre, said since the food crisis, her agency has received more repatriated Haitian boat people in a week than it used to receive in a month or more. "We have received 212 repatriated last week, we have just received 227 and we are receiving 114 tomorrow," Pierre said. The US Coast Guard has intercepted 972 Haitian migrants at sea since Oct. 1, compared with 376 during the same period last year. But the numbers typically fluctuate and it's impossible to link any spike in the numbers to any one event such as the recent food riots, Coast Guard Petty Officer Barry Bena said;

Migration office employees have been sent to poor, seaside neighborhoods to warn people how risky it is to take to the sea in rustic vessels, but they reply by giving examples of friends and relatives they knew made it to Miami. "We even show them pictures of sharks eating people, but they would tell us they know many others who reached US soil and who are now sending money to relatives left in Haiti," said Pierre. There are frequent reports of drownings when unsafe and overloaded migrant vessels capsize or break apart while trying to reach the US and the Bahamas. A suspected migrant smuggling boat capsized off the Bahamas during the previous weekend and rescue crews recovered three survivors and 15 bodies, many of them Haitians.