International aid agencies say they have only weeks to supply food and other life-saving assistance to remote provinces before the winter cuts them off for months as Afghanistan faces the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is trying to move food to mountainous provinces such as Badakhshan and Nuristan in the next two weeks before snow and plunging temperatures make transport prohibitively difficult and expensive.
“We have just weeks, not even a month, remaining before humanitarian organisations can reach these provinces before the conditions render it impossible,” Necephor Mghendi, the IFRC’s Afghanistan head, told the Financial Times. “There’s still a small window of opportunity.”
The IFRC aims to supply food, blankets and other goods to more than 200,000 people around the country before parts of it are largely cut off. But the charity has only raised about 15 per cent of its SFr36m ($39.4M) funding target for Afghanistan.
The warning was made as Afghanistan descends into a worsening humanitarian crisis after the Taliban retook power in August. The foreign aid that accounted for nearly half of gross domestic product stopped since the group’s takeover, leaving everything from banks to hospitals to food distribution in a state of paralysis and an economic crisis.
Cash shortages and widespread poverty have pushed already poor families, weakened by years of drought, to the brink.
The UN’s World Food Programme says about two-thirds of Afghanistan’s population, some 23m people, face acute hunger, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, used by international organisations to measure food security. Of these, 9m are facing “emergency” food insecurity.
Mghendi and other aid workers have urged countries to resume aid to Afghanistan in order to help limit the crisis, warning that sanctions or other punitive financial measures against the Taliban risk exacerbating the suffering.
The EU said last month that it would provide €1bn of aid to Afghanistan and its neighbours and reopen a diplomatic mission in the country. The US also said it would provide $144m in international aid.
But Mghendi said more needed to be done.
Afghanistan “in my view is the most vulnerable [country] in the world at the moment”, Mghendi said. “This is a time when [countries] should rally and provide assistance. If not, then there’s going to be a catastrophic situation.”
“The international community needs to balance between sanctioning individuals and sanctioning countries.”
This has fuelled concerns over a refugee crisis if Afghanistan’s economy continues to deteriorate. The UN says that 700,000 Afghans have already been displaced by conflict and insecurity this year.
David Beasley, chief executive of the World Food Programme, told the BBC this week that the situation in Afghanistan had become “as bad as you possibly can imagine . . . 95 per cent of people don’t have enough food. Now we’re looking at 23m people marching towards starvation.”
He added: “The next six months are going to be catastrophic. It’s going to be hell on earth.”