WFP warns of ‘pre-famine conditions’

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has launched a US $151 million appeal for an emergency operation to avert the threat of starvation for millions of people afflicted by a long and devastating cycle of drought and civil war. “People are surviving on eating grass, locusts and bread crumbs in some areas, and their food intake has been drastically reduced,” WFP’s regional public affairs officer, Khaled Mansour, told IRIN on Thursday. He said these pre-famine conditions in Afghanistan created an urgent need for increasing assistance to Afghans. An extremely disappointing harvest this summer has left the war-torn nation with a cereal deficit of about 2 million mt. Even after estimated imports of 750,000 mt and WFP food shipments, Afghanistan still faces the prospect of a shortfall of over one million tonnes. WFP originally planned to help feed 3.8 million people until March 2002 in a US $76 million operation but has stepped up distributions and says food stocks for this operation will be exhausted much sooner. The agency is now planning to target about 5.5 million people, using more than 366,000 mt of food over 12 months, starting in November. “WFP is seeking support from donors for the new emergency operation in order to avert further deaths from hunger and reduce the mass movement of people to Afghanistan’s cities and neighbouring countries,” the WFP representative to Afghanistan, Gerard Van Dijk, said in a statement. He also called on the local authorities in Afghanistan to extend all the help possible to carry out a task that would be logistically and administratively gigantic. “Without their cooperation, the job will be simply impossible,” Van Dijk added. In addition to helping millions of drought victims and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, WFP’s new emergency operation will target more than half a million urban poor, who will get subsidised bread from bakeries in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. In addition, thousands of girls and boys are to benefit from school feeding projects in the northeastern Badakhshan Province; returning Afghan refugees to get a food grant and hundreds of thousands of peasants and farmers who used to benefit from poppy cultivation are to receive food assistance. About 85 percent of Afghanistan’s estimated 22 million people are directly dependent on agriculture. With their crops ruined by the drought, millions of farmers have lost their purchasing power. Mass unemployment, a failing economy, and a 22-year war have turned Afghanistan into one of the most difficult places to live in on earth. As many as 20 percent of children in certain drought-affected districts die before they are five years old, and the average life expectancy has been reduced to 40 years. “We need to help these people if they are going to have a chance of surviving the winter,” Mansour said on Thursday.