After only a day in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, I find myself trying quietly to guess the age of everyone I meet - because I’ve realised that no one is the age I expect.

I’m here to learn how the world food crisis is affecting people’s daily lives. The price of rice has risen threefold since the start of the year, and many people can’t afford to eat. To illustrate the problem, we want to photograph a sack of rice, but we need someone in the picture to give it scale. Luchina Joseph is pushed forward. She giggles shyly as our photographer positions her next to the sack that’s as tall as she is. Although quiet and thin, she seems fairly healthy for a five-year-old. Then I ask her age. “Eight,” she replies.

Elsewhere in the grey slums that cover Haiti’s hillsides, I spot a girl carrying a tiny new-born baby. “How old?”, I ask. Two months, I’m told. I meet Jonas l’Esperance and think I’m talking to a man in his late forties, his skin lined and lustreless. “I eat once a day or sometimes not at all,” he tells me. “I don’t know what we’ll eat for the rest of today.” I’m shocked when he tells me he’s 34.

Slowly I realise that people who look thin but vaguely healthy are in reality suffering the long-term effects of hunger: children aren’t growing; adults are old before their time. They call the food crisis ‘Clorox’, after a brand of chlorine tablets which cause agonising stomach pains if swallowed - but people aren’t just suffering the physical effects of malnutrition. We think of stress as a fast-paced western disease, but what about the stress of wondering whether you can feed your kids today? Anxiety is ageing people as much as hunger. “I’m very unhappy, I feel I’m going crazy,” says Jonas. “Before food prices rose, I could afford to send my children to school, I could afford healthcare and I bought them clothes - but not now.”

After 1995, when the IMF forced Haiti to cut import tariffs from 50 to three per cent, the market was flooded by subsidised American rice. Haitian producers went out of production, leaving the country nothing to fall back on now imported rice is unaffordable. Before the food crisis people typically ate decent meals of rice, beans and vegetables. Now market sellers are being forced out of business. “I used to sell one sack of rice a day. Now it takes three weeks because people can’t afford it,” says Andrérose Martial (42, going on 50). “Business isn’t good. Lots of traders have stopped selling because they can’t afford stock.”

Fellow seller Esther Wesh adds “We used to spend 75 Gourdes on a meal and have 75 left to go towards school fees. Now you can’t get a meal out of that 150 Gourdes. I haven’t eaten today, and only God knows whether I will.”

It all gives new meaning to the notion of the daily grind. Here it’s not waking up and groaning ‘work/commute/school-run again’, but thinking ‘Where will I find food today? Will I be able to feed my children?’ Worries that would put years on anyone.

More from the Oxfam Press Office at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/news

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]

[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]