Wage labour buys workers little food

The World Food Programme (WFP) in Afghanistan on Friday released a comprehensive survey of casual wage labour, portraying a grim picture of the country’s war-devastated economy. The analysis, which measured purchasing power by calculating how much wheat a worker could buy with a daily wage, found that purchasing power was down in all major Afghan cities. The most serious instances of decline were found in Faizabad, capital of the northern Badakhshan province (57 percent), Herat in the west (50 percent), and Mazar in the Balkh province in the north (32 percent). The study noted that the average wage received by casual labourers in the main cities was down, in real terms, by between 4 and 49 percent compared to one year ago. Moreover, job-seekers in Mazar, desperate for work, reportedly accepted as little as $0.36 equivalent in afghanis as a daily wage. “Because of drought, in tandem with endemic poverty and under-development, only in Jalalabad [Nangarhar province, in the east] and Kandahar [in the south of the country] can an average household (six-member familieis) with one able-bodied male provide adequately for their minimum food needs alone through urban labour markets,” the report stated. Afghanistan’s urban poor households relied for between 73 percent to 100 percent of their income on wage labour, according to the WFP study. Many drought-affected rural families were looking for work in urban labour markets, it said. Between 37 percent to 78 percent of men seeking employment had ‘migrated’ to urban areas from rural areas, the report said. The Afghan capital Kabul has drawn the largest proportion of migrant workers, attracted particularly to the construction and trade sectors. “Further polarisation in cereal prices and labour wages, and hence labouring families’ food security, are anticipated as the winter approaches,” according to the Office of the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan. [For full report, go to: http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/WCT?OpenForm]