WFP closes Pamir aid corridor to Afghanistan

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has halted logistics operations in Tajikistan's eastern border crossing of Ishkashim, thus closing one of its major Central Asian aid corridors to Afghanistan.

"We are adapting to new realities, and now that the food emergency is over in Afghanistan, we have to look at cost-effective ways of providing supplies," Ardag Meghdessian, WFP's country director, told IRIN in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.

WFP first established the pipeline in 1993, bringing in supplies through the Baltic Sea ports of Riga and Ventspils, from which the food aid would be transported about 3,000 km by rail through Russia to Osh in southern Kyrgyzstan. It was then trucked to Ishkashim at the southernmost tip of the eastern Tajik province of Badakhshoni Kuhi bordering the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan, across 900 km of mountain roads in the Pamir and Tien Shan ranges, including seven passes higher than 4,000 metres.

"This became a lifeline during the civil war when the Taliban were not controlling northeastern Afghanistan," Meghdessian said. After Afghanistan's hardline Islamist Taliban captured the country's capital, Kabul, in 1996, they tried to take over the northern and northeastern provinces controlled by the Northern Alliance. The resulting fighting, coupled with the worst regional drought in living memory, left hundreds of thousands of Afghans destitute and dependent for their survival on humanitarian assistance.

Subsequently, in the winter months following the US-led coalition's military operation against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies in October 2001, the WFP again used this corridor to supply food to a vulnerable population of hundreds of thousands in temperatures reaching as low a minus 35 C. However, after the middle of 2002, the importance of this route declined, because the major food crisis was over.

Although the WFP has closed the pipeline, it continues to supply food aid to the northeastern Afghan province of Konduz via its southern Tajik logistic basis of Qurghonteppa, from where it is taken to the Tajik river port of Niyzhniy Pyandzh and thence to Sher Khan Bandar and shipped on barges across the Amudar'ya river separating the two countries.

The closure coincides with the scaling back of supplies from another Central Asian logistics hub - Turkmenabad in Turkmenistan's eastern Lebap Province. According to agency sources, such decisions are based on priority food needs in Afghanistan, where the major areas of assistance have shifted from the north to the south. These are supplied through the southern Pakistani ports in Karachi and Port Qasim.