The U.N. food agency is ap­peal­ing for $46 mil­lion for the next six months to help about 2 mil­lion Haitians in dire need of food, in­clud­ing 8,500 at the worst cat­a­stroph­ic lev­el of hunger.

The ap­peal was is­sued by Lo­la Cas­tro, the World Food Pro­gram’s re­gion­al di­rec­tor for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, who re­cent­ly re­turned from Haiti, where es­ca­lat­ing gang vi­o­lence has dis­placed well over 1 mil­lion peo­ple and left half the pop­u­la­tion — 5.7 mil­lion peo­ple — in ur­gent need of food.

Two mil­lion of them are in the two worst cat­e­gories in the In­te­grat­ed Food Se­cu­ri­ty Phase Clas­si­fi­ca­tion, the lead­ing in­ter­na­tion­al au­thor­i­ty on hunger crises, and 8,500 are in the worst Phase 5 cat­e­go­ry, she said. That means at least one in five peo­ple or house­holds se­vere­ly lack food and face star­va­tion and des­ti­tu­tion.