In a status report on the situation in Afghanistan issued on Dec. 29, 2021, the World Food Program (WFP) documented that 22.8 million people—half of the population—will face acute food insecurity from November 2021, including 8.7 million at risk of famine-like conditions. In addition, 3.2 million children and 700,000 pregnant and lactating women are currently at risk of acute malnutrition. All 34 provinces are facing crisis or emergency levels of acute food insecurity. For 2022, the WFP reported that its goal is to meet the food and nutrition needs of more than 23 million people, which would require US$220 million per month. Imagine what it might mean for this effort were the U.S. Treasury to release the $9.4 billion it illegally seized from the Afghan Central Bank last August.
In 2021, the WFP reached around 15 million people. Since August, it has reached more and more beneficiaries each month, including over 7 million in December. In Kabul, on Dec. 18, it launched commodity vouchers supporting 300,000 people and their local markets.
These are laudable efforts, but insufficient, even combined with humanitarian aid coming from other agencies and countries. The situation cries out for the Schiller Institute’s proposal for a world health platform and emergency development program to prevent further catastrophe.
On Dec. 23, 2021, Johnathan Dumont, head of TV Communications for the WFP, wrote of his visit to Afghanistan a month earlier with a WFP team, describing a situation that he called “the unveiling of a tragedy in real time,” a level of unimaginable deprivation and despair which is only mitigated by WFP food shipments—when they get through. He pointed to a UN Development Program assessment that it took five years of war in Syria for that economy to contract as much as Afghanistan’s has just since August of last year, when international sanctions were imposed and Central Bank reserves frozen after the Taliban took power.
The WFP tries to preposition food before the winter snows make roads impassable, but as Dumont put it, “like outrunning an avalanche, the surge in hunger tends to overcome the convoys of trucks snaking up mountain paths loaded with food.” In many cases, when WFP food isn’t available, or delivered, people simply starve. The most basic staples, like bread, are either unavailable or too expensive to buy. Soaring fuel prices have driven the price of wheat through the roof. Drought has killed crops and livestock. Hunger has hit the professional class in cities as well. In Afghanistan’s commercial center of Mazar-i-Sharif, Dumont saw doctors, school principals, and military officers trying to sell anything they could—dishes, furniture, kitchen utensils, shoes. But, “nobody was buying, nobody could afford to,” Dumont reported..
To date, 500,000 Afghans have fled their country’s desperate conditions and entered Iran. Although Iran’s borders are officially closed to asylum seekers, Afghans manage to enter the country through unofficial border crossings.The UN High commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, visited Iran from Dec. 17-21, and after meeting with government authorities, called on the international community to support the Iranian government and people in their efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to the Afghan refugees. https://reliefweb.int/report/iran-islamic-republic/afghanistan-situation-emergency-preparedness-and-response-iran-30
