Port-au-Prince, September 14 (Telesur/RHC) – The agriculture ministry in Haiti has estimated that the subsistence food crops of roughly 18,000 family farms located in the Caribbean island's northern region were destroyed during the passage of Hurricane Irma.

While Haiti was spared from the center of storm, heavy rain and winds swept away fields blooming with rice and plantains along coastal areas, leaving thousands of Haitian farmers in dire straits.

"Their livelihoods have been, and will remain, severely affected," said the country director of the United Nations World Food Program, Ronald Tran Ba Huy.

He said the program continues to distribute food in Haiti although the full extent of the damage is still unclear.

Irma struck Haiti, the first independent Black nation in the western world, less than a year after widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Mathew and three years into a severe drought affecting the island's northern region.

And Haiti has yet to fully recover from the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake of 2010, which leveled entire parts of the island and left well over 100,000 people dead and many more displaced.