Aid workers call for support for the north

A farmer grasps a handful of withered wheat in the village of Loqman Barati, which is all but deserted. Like countless other villages in this remote area of northwestern Afghanistan, this cluster of mud houses is being abandoned. “These are the worst conditions I have seen,” the village mullah, Sayyed Ahmad, told IRIN. “There were droughts before, but only for one year... but now it continues for three years so the people have nothing left to sell for food. This year is very difficult for us.” In less than a few weeks, resources would be exhausted and the remaining villagers be forced to leave, Ahmad predicted. “We do not have proper flour, our bread is made from corn and our water has become salty. The good water is so far from here - about four hours by donkey, and we cannot feed the animals.” One group said they had been farmers until the drought forced them to sell their livestock. “All the young people left their homes to try and find employment, and now only women, children and old people remain,” said a man from the district of Astanobaba. “Maybe we will stay in our village for about one month, and after that we will leave, because there is no water to drink and nothing to eat.” Until the onset of the current drought, Faryab Province in northwestern Afghanistan was regarded as part of the country’s breadbasket, included in a sweeping arc of rain-fed land stretching from the northern region towards the southwest. Now, much of the land lies cultivated, but barren, due to a shortage of seeds and rain. “All of this would be green in a normal year,” said Farhana Faruqi, UN Regional Coordinating Officer for the northern region. In the seven and a half provinces in her region of responsibility, “this year only 30 to 40 percent of cultivatable land was planted”, she said. The mounting crisis has prompted several western aid agencies to start operations in Maymaneh, the provincial capital of Faryab. Save the Children- USA opened an office in March, and the UN has plans to set up premises there. Medecins Sans Frontieres, already present in the area, introduced three supplementary feeding centres two months ago, and a system to monitor nutrition levels in the villages. However, aid workers believe a far greater relief effort is needed in order to try and stem the flow of displaced populations. “It’s very hard to attract NGOs to come here,” said Faruqi. “There is still a very limited understanding of the security situation. And distances are great, it’s a big area. When organisations come here they end up having localised programmes.” Northern Afghanistan has seen its share of fighting during the 21 years of conflict in the country. The return in April of former warlord General Dostum to join the opposition forces in their struggle to oust the ruling Taliban has heightened security fears. Logistical challenges are also considerable, with some of the most vulnerable populations living in hard-to-access mountainous areas in the south of Faryab. “We are not hearing [of] donors committing money to the north to fund agencies there,” said Andrew Wilder, field office director for Save the Children-USA. “We are heading into a major calamity and it’s going to get much worse. We need to be gearing up to it.” “We are trying to get donors to concentrate more on the areas of outflow for the IDPs (internally displaced people) rather than on the IDP camps themselves,” said Wilder. “Once they are in the camps, it is hard to come up with an exit strategy.” In nearby Balkh Province, the newest arrivals at the Chimtal IDP camp outside the city of Mazar-i-Sharif are an illustration of people who have reached the end of their resources in the north. They have set up makeshift tents consisting of blankets stretched over poles. Some have dug two-foot deep rectangular-shaped holes in the earth in an attempt to gain respite from the relentless heat. “We haven’t received anything yet from the UN,” said Sarah Mahtab, sitting on the ground inside her shack-like shelter. “There is no room in the camp,” she says, referring to an adjacent area, where, according to the World Food Programme, 600 families are registered and receiving wheat at two camps. According to Faiz Mohammad, himself an unregistered IDP, about 120 families have arrived in the past week. Drinking water comes from the nearby river, they have little shelter, and most are surviving on meagre hand-outs that their children have managed to beg from the bazaar. Some of the IDPs said they had been living with local families until pooled resources ran dry. Faruqi said the UN was aware of this new influx, and was discussing how to deal with it. While those aid agencies present in the northern region would prefer to target vulnerable communities before they leave their villages and thus somewhat control IDP numbers, resources are limited and the crisis threatens to escalate out of control. “People are giving up and we’ve not seen that before,” said Wilder. “There’s an assumption that they will go on indefinitely, but we are beginning to feel they are getting near the end. We are not really prepared for that.”