Aid pipeline to Afghanistan scaling back

Although 80,000 mt of food sponsored by World Food Programme (WFP) has been transited via Turkmenistan into northern Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the past 12 months, the amount is diminishing as emergency food needs in the region change, IRIN learnt on Thursday. "Over the past year, approximately 78,000 mt of WFP food crossed Turkmenabad in Turkmenistan bordering northwestern Afghanistan, with a monthly average of 6,500 mt," Sewoo Kim, a WFP reports officer in the Afghan capital, Kabul, told IRIN. Located 330 km north of the Afghan border along the Amudarya river, the city, formerly known as Chardzhev, is the capital of the country's eastern Lebap Province, and well placed for logistical operations such as the WFP's. The city continues to provide a vital regional hub for the storage and transportation of aid through Turkmenistan to Afghanistan. The food was supplied to major logistics hubs in the region for WFP operations in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Commodities included 74,570 mt of wheat, 2,945 mt of wheat flour, 300 mt of corn-soya-blend and 107 mt of sugar. Fifty percent of the food, or 39,043 mt, has been dispatched to Afghanistan, to help combat hunger. A year ago, with emergency relief for Afghanistan well established, Turkmenabad was the most important hub for humanitarian assistance in Central Asia. But the food pipeline through Turkmenabad has been drastically reduced in the last few months, as WFP began to shift the focus of its operation in Afghanistan from emergency relief to recovery. The cutback in food aid through Turkmenistan is also related to a shift in priority food needs in Afghanistan. "The area in major need of food assistance has shifted from northern Afghanistan to southwestern Afghanistan," Kim said. As a result, most of the WFP food bound for Afghanistan has been channeled recently through the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi and Port Qasim in Iran rather than through Turkmenabad. The UN food agency anticipated a further reduction in the food flow in forthcoming months through Turkmenistan, and predicted that the logistics hub in Turkmenabad might not be operational beyond December 2003, if not earlier. During the peak of the Afghan emergency, WFP received cash contributions with which a considerable quantity of wheat was procured in the region. Due to this, Turkmenabad was very active from the end of 2001 until the second quarter of 2002. Turkmenistan was the first Central Asian nation to allow cross-border humanitarian operations. When the crisis started in Afghanistan, the government was quick to facilitate the United Nations, a fact that the UN resident representative in Turkmenistan, Khaled Philby, believes is an important step forward for Ashgabat. "The results were that close to 50 percent of all the aid that went into Afghanistan during the war period came through Turkmenistan. So while other places like Uzbekistan got more favourable reporting, the reality was the bulk of northern aid to Afghanistan came through Turkmenistan," he said.