More than half of Lebanon’s migrant workers are in need of “urgent humanitarian assistance” to survive an economic crisis that has plunged most of the population into poverty, the UN warned Tuesday. The country of six million is in the throes of a financial downturn branded by the World Bank as one of the worst since the mid-19th century, with the local currency losing more than 90 percent of its blackmarket value. Seventy eight percent of the country’s population now lives in poverty, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said last week — a proportion far higher than last year’s figure of around 55 percent. Extreme poverty has reached an estimated 36 per cent of the Lebanese population, OCHA said. The International Organization for Migration said Tuesday that migrant workers had been hit especially hard.