Oanaminthe, Haiti – It’s a Monday afternoon at the Foi et Joie school in rural northeast Haiti, and the grounds are a swirl of khaki and blue uniforms, as hundreds of children run around after lunch.In front of the headmaster’s office, a tall man in a baseball cap stands in the shade of a mango tree.Antoine Nelson, 43, is the father of five children in the school. He’s also one of the small-scale farmers growing the beans, plantains, okra, papaya and other produce served for lunch here, and he has arrived to help deliver food.”I sell what the school serves,” Nelson explained. “It’s an advantage for me as a parent.”Nelson is among the more than 32,000 farmers across Haiti whose produce goes to the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency, for distribution to local schools.Together, the farmers feed an estimated 600,000 students each day.Their work is part of a shift in how the World Food Programme operates in Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere.Rather than solely importing food to crisis-ravaged regions, the UN organisation has also worked to increase its collaborations wi …
