WFP launches new emergency appeal

Targeting 3.8 million people, the World Food Programme (WFP) launched an appeal on Monday for a US $76 million emergency operation to save people from starvation in Afghanistan, the UN food agency announced in Rome. "In view of the drought, we have decided to accelerate our food distribution efforts," WFP representative for Afghanistan Girard Van Dijk told IRIN on Wednesday. "We need to launch a new, and larger, emergency operation in Afghanistan in April because it is already evident that the upcoming wheat harvest, due in July, will not meet the food needs of the people." The new appeal follows a July 2000 appeal for some US $55 million, or 118,000 mt, of wheat which was exhausted within nine months after conditions within Afghanistan worsened. "We believe there will be a severe crop shortfall because of the shortage of good quality seed in the country," Van Dijk said on Wednesday. Thousands of farmers who had fled their home villages to large cities in Afghanistan or to Pakistan and Iran in search of food would be unlikely to return for the new planting season, he added. "There have been three consecutive years of severe drought in Afghanistan and we can see that millions of people are at real risk of starving to death," Van Dijk warned. "We want to intensify food distribution to avert further displacement within Afghanistan or to neighbouring countries such as Pakistan," in addition to reducing the risk of starvation among an estimated one million Afghans currently at risk, WFP Regional Public Affairs Officer Khaled Mansour told IRIN. The UN estimates there are some 600,000 displaced persons within Afghanistan as a result of conflict or drought, while over 170,000 Afghan refugees have crossed into Pakistan since September alone - the largest influx of Afghans into the country since the fall to the Taliban Islamic Movement of the Afghan capital, Kabul, in 1998. The UN estimates that 85 percent of Afghanistan's 21.9 million population are directly dependent on agriculture. With their crops ruined by drought, millions of Afghans have lost their purchasing power because of mass unemployment, a moribund economy and a 21-year-old civil war. In a bid to mobilise its resources more efficiently, WFP is consolidating its current emergency and development operations into a single drive to reach the poor and hungry, it said this week.