WFP Bakeries set to close on Friday

With four days left until the deadline for the closure of the UN bakeries in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and still no sign of a “positive response” from the Taliban, WFP spokesman Khaled Mansour told IRIN on Tuesday he was “not optimistic” of a last minute breakthrough.

The Taliban’s refusal to allow the UN to use women to survey the people in the capital most in need of subsidised bread, will force WFP to close the bakeries feeding 280,000 people by the end of business on Friday 15 June.
The current list of approved recipients of the bakeries’ product is outdated, and the UN believes many hungry people are having to do without. The UN says that only women can survey the city, as, under Islamic Emirate (Taliban) rules, men are not permitted to talk to women.

Last week WFP put another proposal to the Taliban. The food agency suggested it would consider using an equal number of women from the Taliban Ministry of Health, in addition to those independently hired by the UN. “We insisted on independently hired women to ensure the integrity and accuracy of the outcome of the survey. There are too many people on the beneficiary list who should not be there, and too many truly vulnerable people in Kabul who are not on the list,” Mansour said. By Tuesday, the UN had still not received a response from the Taliban authorities.

The immediate impact will mean that distribution of wheat to 130 of the 150 bakeries in the capital will stop on Saturday morning, following a final distribution on Friday. Despite this, Mansour stressed that “food will not be taken out of Kabul”. He said WFP’s plan was not to deprive Kabul of food aid it deserved, and that it would be stepping up its food-for-work programmes and looking at other ways of reaching the “most needy”.

Earlier reports that Saudi dissident Usama bin-Ladin had offered financial support to enable the Taliban to operate the bakeries should the UN be forced to pull out have not been substantiated. One Pakistan-based aid agency, the Al-Rasheed Trust, has announced its willingness to step in to fill any vacuum. WFP remains sceptical, however, that another aid agency would be able to support such a large operation. WFP gives 3,000 mt of wheat flour per month to provide subsidised bread, which is sold at 12 percent of the market value to families who hold ration cards. “I am worried that any other NGO would not be able to support such a programme. However, if it could, I would welcome it. The problem is that if another aid agency takes over the bakeries, it is going to face the same problems we have of outdated beneficiary lists,” Mansour said.

WFP asserts that it has already compromised over an initial proposal put to the Taliban last year, which involved the use of 600 women to survey the entire city of Kabul. Since then, WFP has scaled back its plans and said it will initially target only the beneficiaries of its bakeries, who represent a quarter of the city’s population. “We want to make sure that those who have ration cards are bona fide food ration families,” Mansour said. Subsequently, WFP would broaden the survey to take in an extra 7,000 families who were previously supported by ICRC.

While the WFP bakeries could be the immediate casualty, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, Erick de Mul, has not ruled out the risk to other UN humanitarian programmes as the result of mounting obstacles created by the Taliban in recent months. “We will have to see how things are moving. If the trend that we have been seeing over the last half year continues, and especially the last month, of increased harassment and obstacles, we will have no choice,” de Mul said on 30 May.