Millions still in need of food aid as drought continues

Millions of people continue to suffer food shortages due to ongoing drought in parts of the south and east of Afghanistan, IRIN learnt on Tuesday. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) told IRIN on Tuesday, that food shortages were still an issue of concern in many parts of the country. “According to our survey, up to four million people in rural areas of Afghanistan are not able to provide all their food needs,” Maarten Roest, a spokesman for WFP, told IRIN in the capital Kabul. According to WFP, due to a resurgence of drought and security problems, people are suffering severe food insecurity in certain rural areas. “We are receiving more and more information of drought in expanding areas of Afghan territory,” he said, adding that the UN food agency was reassessing the scale of the food shortage to address the rising humanitarian problem. Despite higher rainfall in 2003 and a recovery from five years of severe drought, many provinces in the southern and central parts of Afghanistan are once again threatened by food shortages. Earlier this month, the governor of the southern city of Kandahar, Yousuf Pashtun, declared southern Afghanistan a drought-affected region and called upon UN agencies and aid organisations for urgent assistance. Meanwhile, WFP’s concern follows a report by the Paris-based Action Contre la Faim (ACF) aid agency, which alerted the aid community to the possibility of a severe food shortage in central Afghanistan last Wednesday. ACF said in the areas of Hazarajat and Ghor, people are still facing severe food insecurity. According to the report, more than 75 percent of arable land in these areas lies barren due to lack of water. With households no longer self-sufficient since the start of the drought, ACF said people had allocated 70 percent of their budgets to buying food. “In order to obtain money, they have built up heavy debts, sold off much of their cattle and migrated to other countries or major cities in Afghanistan,” the ACF report said, adding that loans were becoming more difficult to obtain and that nearly 75 per cent of cattle in the region had been sold off or destroyed.