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 with local farmers around the world.

But in Haiti, this change has been particularly swift. Over the last decade, the World Food Programme went from sourcing no school meals from within Haiti to procuring approximately 72 percent locally. It aims to reach 100 percent by 2030.

The organisation’s local procurement of emergency food aid also increased significantly during the same period.

This year, however, has brought new hurdles. In the first months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the United States has slashed funding for the World Food Programme.

The agency announced in October it faces a financial shortfall of $44m in Haiti alone over the next six months.

And the need for assistance continues to grow. Gang violence has shuttered public services, choked off roadways, and displaced more than a million people.

A record 5.7 million Haitians are facing “acute levels of hunger” as of October — more than the World Food Programme is able to reach.

“Needs continue to outpace resources,” Wanja Kaaria, the programme’s director in Haiti, said in a recent statement. “We simply don’t have the resources to meet all the growing needs.”

But for Nelson, outreach efforts like the school lunch programme have been a lifeline.

Before his involvement, he remembers days when he could not afford to feed his children breakfast or give them lunch money for school.

“They wouldn’t take in what the teacher was saying because they were hungry,” he said. “But now, when the school gives food, they retain whatever the teacher says. It helps the children advance in school.”

Now, experts warn some food assistance programmes could disappear if funding continues to dwindle — potentially turning back the clock on efforts to empower Haitian farmers.

‘He lost his entire business’

Transitioning to locally sourced food assistance has been challenging in Haiti largely for the same reason farming is: Buying local produce is often more expensive.

But many credit Jean-Martin Bauer with helping that shift to happen.

Bauer, the director of food security and nutrition analysis at the World Food Programme, was born in the US to a Haitian mother. But he spent part of his teenage years on his uncle’s rice farm in southern Haiti, perched at the edge of the Caribbean Sea.

Those early experiences helped spark his interest in food security. But they also opened his eyes to the risks associated with foreign influence in agriculture.

Until about 30 years ago, Haitians grew most of what they ate: grains, beans and vegetables. For much of the 20th century, agricultural products also encompassed the largest share of its foreign exports.

But after the fall of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986, the US-backed provisional government agreed to lift trade restrictions, including those designed to protect Haitian agriculture.

It was the beginning of the end for some Haitian farmers. Ten years later, under pressure from the US and International Monetary Fund, Haiti slashed tariffs on rice imports from 35 to 3 percent.

“That’s something that really hurt my family,” Bauer recalled.

Haiti quickly became one of the most lucrative markets for exported US-grown rice in the world. The country was flooded with cheap “Miami rice”, which outcompeted locally grown grains.

Bauer’s uncle was among the local farmers harmed by the market upheaval.

“He lost his entire business,” Bauer said. “He lost its customers as a result of the overnight reduction in tariffs.”