Geneva:
Many Afghans had been struggling to feed their households amid extreme drought properly just before the Taliban seized energy last month and millions may well now face starvation with the nation isolated and the economy unravelling, help agencies say.
“In the current context there are no national safety nets…Since the 15th of August (when the Taliban took over), we have seen the crisis accelerate and magnify with the imminent economic collapse that is coming this country’s way,” Mary-Ellen McGroarty, World Food Programme nation director in Afghanistan, told Reuters by videolink from Kabul.
In an August video supplied by the WFP, Afghan females wearing head to toe-covering burqas and males in turbans line up for supplies at a U.N. meals distribution centre in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. A bearded man leaves carrying a sack of 46 kilos (101.4 pounds) of fortified wheat flour on his back.
“There are no crops, no rain, no water and people are living in misery. This is a great mercy from God and it really helps poor and needy people,” Delawar, who lives in Balkh province whose capital is Mazar, says in the video right after having rations for his family of eight.
Food rates have spiked because the second drought in 4 years ruined some 40% of the wheat crop, according to the WFP.
Millions of Afghans could quickly face starvation due to the mixture of conflict, drought and COVID-19, it has stated. It has urgently appealed for $200 million, warning that WFP supplies will run out by October as winter sets in.
“The situation that we have unfolding at the moment is absolutely horrendous and could morph into just a humanitarian catastrophe,” stated McGroarty.
“The Taliban depend on the U.N. and they know it – they can’t feed the population,” stated yet another U.N. official who has worked in Afghanistan but declined to be identified.
Moreover, civil servants’ salaries are not getting paid, the currency has depreciated, and banks have restricted weekly withdrawals to $200 because the Taliban takeover, McGroarty stated.
WFP has maintained operations all through Afghanistan and has been in a position to import meals from Uzbekistan and Pakistan, reaching 200,000 people today with supplies in the previous two weeks, she stated, and hopes to restore an air bridge to Kabul airport.
‘PALLOR AND PAIN’
McGroarty, an Irish help veteran, has met some of the 550,000 Afghans uprooted by fighting and drought this year, now living in makeshift tents. In June, she visited meals centres in Mazar that distribute wheat flour, oil, lentils and salt.
“I just see the grey and the pallor and the pain in their faces as now they have to put their hands out for something to be able to feed their children,” she stated.
McGroarty, recalling Afghanistan’s 2017-2018 drought, stated: “People are again faced with no food in the larder, no food to put on the table, having to sell the little bit of assets or livestock that they have to try to survive.”
A lack of each snow and rainfall has left “fields of dust” in drought-hit Mazar and Herat to the west, she stated, adding: “So it’s just a tapestry of one crisis on top of the other.”
Malnutrition currently impacts one in two children beneath the age of 5 in Afghanistan, exactly where 14 million people today or one-third of the population faces “acute food insecurity”, the WFP says.
Its most current assessment says that 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces showed significantly less meals consumption in the last month, the worst-hit getting Ghazni, Khost, and Paktika in the east.
“While a refugee outflow is not an immediate likelihood, food shortages, further insecurity and economic downturn could hasten such a scenario in Afghanistan,” it stated.
Christine Cipolla, the International Committee of the Red Cross’s regional director for Asia and the Pacific, stated that fighting, drought and harm to crucial services had triggered internal displacement.
Critical infrastructure in Kunduz, Kandahar, and Lashkar Gah has been destroyed, she told Reuters. “We have seen attacks on medical facilities, civilian homes, electricity supply, water supply systems – and all that will need to be repaired.”
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