Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who flew to visit the worst-affected town of Les Cayes in southwest Haiti soon after Saturday’s quake of magnitude 7.2, had praised the dignity shown by survivors and promised a rapid escalation of aid.

But following another night of rains, residents in Les Cayes, including those camped in a mushrooming tent city in the centre of the town, complained of scant help on the ground.

Dozens of people showed up at the local airport demanding food after a helicopter arrived carrying supplies, according to a Reuters witness. Police intervened to allow a truck carrying aid to leave.

Pierre Cenel, a local judge in Les Cayes, a town of some 100,000 inhabitants, aimed his ire at the government in Port-au-Prince, echoing the bubbling frustration in the hardest-hit regions.

“As a judge, I must not have a political opinion. But as a man, as a man concerned about the situation of my country, nothing is working. They didn’t do anything to prepare for this disaster,” Cenel said in downtown Les Cayes.

Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, is still recovering from a quake 11 years ago that killed more than 200,000. The latest calamity comes just over a month after the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moise plunged the country into political turmoil.

Jerry Chandler, the head of Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency, which handles emergency response, said he was aware that aid had yet to reach many communities but said officials were working hard to deliver support and appealed for patience.

“The frustration and despair of the population is understood, but… the population is asked not to block the convoys so that the Civil Protection can do its job and help those in need,” he told a news conference.

There were at least 600,000 people in need of humanitarian assistance and 135,000 families displaced, Chandler said, adding that the goal was to deliver aid to everyone in need within a week.

In an effort to avoid what it said was a confused response to the 2010 quake, Haiti’s government has sent a list of humanitarian needs to partners and is sorting the international aid as it arrives to distribute it to the most needy, Chandler said.

On Wednesday morning, four U.S. Coast Guard helicopters landed in Les Cayes, bringing patients from more remote areas for treatment, according to an airport worker. The United States has dispatched humanitarian supplies as well as search and rescue teams to Haiti.

Latin American countries such as Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela have also sent food, medicine and supplies, and Taiwan — which has diplomatic relations with Haiti — also swiftly dispatched aid. Puerto Rican authorities said they were sending more rescue workers and doctors who were expected to arrive on Wednesday.

Risk of disease

In the fast-expanding tent city in Les Cayes, residents desperately pleaded for assistance. Aid workers have also warned about the risks of waterborne diseases, such as cholera.

“We need help,” said Roosevelt Milford, a pastor speaking on radio on behalf of the hundreds camping out in soggy fields since the quake destroyed their homes.

Milford and others complained that they lacked even the most basic types of aid, such as food, clean drinking water, and shelter from the rain. Tanks of drinking water were destroyed during the quake, impacting reserves, authorities said.

Tropical Storm Grace, which sloughed across southern Haiti this week, had swept away many shelters and inundated the field, adding to the misery.

In a country with high levels of violent crime, residents had set up their own security teams to keep watch at night, paying particular attention to the safety of women and girls, he added.

Security concerns about the gang-controlled areas on the route from the capital Port-au-Prince, as well as quake damage to some roads, have slowed access to some of the worst-affected zones difficult for aid and rescue teams.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that successful negotiations with armed groups had permitted a humanitarian convoy to reach Les Cayes.

Chandler said the government was now escalating the number of aid convoys travelling by land, and hoped to soon reach three per day.

However, he said flash flooding and landslides in the wake of Grace, which swept past Jamaica by Tuesday afternoon, worsened the difficulties of reaching remote communities.

In the smaller town of L’Asile, some 60 km to the northeast of Les Cayes and home to more than 30,000 people, community leader Aldorf Hilaire said government help had yet to arrive, and survivors were reliant on support from charities such as Doctors Without Borders.

“We are desperate,” he told Reuters. “The springs are dirty: the water is not drinkable… We had a bad night during the storm and the people need tents and tarps.”

Hospitals damaged

Authorities said on Wednesday that the earthquake had killed at least 1,941 people and injured some 9,900 others, but with rescuers still pulling bodies from the rubble the tally looks set to rise.

In a rare piece of good news, 34 people had been rescued from under the rubble in the last two days, Chandler said, though as time passes, hopes for survivors dim. It was difficult to carry out search and rescue operations due to landslides in some areas, he added.

Quake damage has hampered the work of several major hospitals. Doctors in makeshift tents have battled to save the injured, from young children to the elderly.

Dozens in the Les Cayes tent city hailed from the nearby poor neighbourhood of Impasse Filadelfia, where crumbling cement homes, contorted tin roofs and soaked mattresses lined narrow dirt roads.

Water surged into the modest homes after a fast-moving river that edges the neighbourhood burst its banks during the quake.

“We are crying out for help,” said one of them, Claudel Ledan. “All our houses collapsed and we need help from the government urgently.”

— Laura Gottesdiener is a Reuters correspondent covering Mexico and Central America.

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Mexico will “revoke and refrain from granting permits for the release of genetically modified corn seeds into the environment,” stated a decree issued Thursday evening, which also mandated the phase-out of GMO corn imports by 2024.

Proponents of GMO corn say the ban on domestic cultivation would limit the options of Mexican farmers, while phasing out its importation could imperil the food chain.

“The lack of access to production options puts us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors, such as corn farmers in the United States,” said Laura Tamayo, spokeswoman for Mexico’s National Farm Council.

“On the other hand, the import of genetically modified grain from the U.S. is essential for many products in the agrifood chain,” added Tamayo, also a regional corporate director for Bayer, whose agrochemical unit Monsanto makes Roundup herbicide and the GMO corn designed to survive the chemical’s application.

Opponents of genetically modified crops celebrated the ban.

“It’s a huge victory,” said Homero Blas, head of Mexico’s Organic Producers’ Society.

Opponents of GMO crops say they contaminate age-old native varieties of corn and encourage the use of dangerous pesticides that endanger public health and harm biodiversity.

Mexico is largely self-sufficient in white corn used to make the country’s staple tortillas, but depends on imports of mostly GMO yellow corn from the U.S. for livestock feed.

It was unclear whether the decree will phase out imported GMO corn for livestock, or whether the rules will only apply to corn grown for human consumption.

The rules mandate a phase-out by 2024 of the use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the same year that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador leaves office.

Bayer agreed to pay as much as US$10.9 billion to settle close to 100,000 U.S. lawsuits claiming that Roundup caused cancer.

— Reporting for Reuters by Laura Gottesdiener.

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By 2 a.m. on Tuesday, tense men and women with cloth face masks and bandanas jostled for position in a line hundreds deep through the underpass leading from the city of Mexicali to the U.S. port of entry. Vendors sold tamales. A mariachi player lightened the mood. But the only hand-washing station was broken.

The daily back-and-forth flow to work in the United States and sleep back in Mexico, essential to both the $2 billion Imperial Valley fruit and vegetable harvests and to thousands of families in Mexico, is a testament to the deeply entwined economies on either side of the border (all figures US$).

But the lack of safety measures and the late night crowds stand in contrast to a curfew imposed in Mexicali this week to try to stem the city’s fast rising contagion, as well as to maintain six-feet distancing measures in the border station itself.

While no infections have been definitively linked to the Calexico West crossing, both the documented day labourers and U.S. border agents worry the lack of social distancing on the Mexican side and the slow processing at the port of entry put them at risk.

Jose Salazar, who earns $500 to $600 harvesting melon in California six days a week, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should add agents to cut the time spent in the line.

“‘La migra’ has not taken care to put on more officers, and that makes the pandemic grow,” he said, using slang for border agents.

The stifling underground tunnel, smelling of sweat and the occasional cigarette and lined with pharmacies advertising Viagra, passes underneath the border fence to a flight of crowded stairs ending at the Calexico West port of entry gate.

Eight farm workers told Reuters they wait two to three hours each night to cross and worry they are more exposed to the virus before the port of entry than in the fields.

Fearful of spending so much time in line, some nights Salazar stays with his son in El Centro, California, rather than head home, he said.

On the U.S. side of the port of entry, CBP agents impose social distancing rules. But some officers said the measures were undermined by the conditions in the tunnel.

“It’s kind of pointless for us to be six feet apart if they (the border crossers) are all crowded up first,” said one CBP agent, waiting for a test at a Calexico clinic after relatives contracted coronavirus and his son developed a fever.

The officer, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, told Reuters he was worried about on-the-job exposure.

Mexico’s National Immigration Institute did not immediately respond to questions about lack of distancing enforcement and other sanitary measures in the tunnel.

A spokeswoman said CBP was “taking every available precaution to minimize the risk of exposure to our workforce and to members of the public.”

In California, 84 CBP employees have tested positive for COVID-19, the agency said. It did not give data specifically for Calexico.

Employers have asked for Calexico’s second port of entry to open at night to avoid bottlenecks.

“We have continued to request that CBP increase the hours of its Calexico East Port of Entry as well so that our agricultural employees can utilize that border crossing,” said Brea Mohamed, executive director of the Imperial County Farm Bureau.

— Reporting for Reuters by Laura Gottesdiener.

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