KABUL (Xinhua) – Afghanistan’s state-owned bread factory, Silo-e-Markazi or central silo, which located in the national capital Kabul, reactivated and resumed production on Sunday, after decades of production stoppage, chief of the bread producing body, Khayal Mohammad Maher said.
“After hectic efforts we have reactivated the Silo-e-Markazi to resume production and for the first time over the past 30 years it begun baking breads and cakes,” Maher told reporters here.
The factory, which has been badly damaged since the 1990s and stopped functioning since 1992, would be fully reconstructed to increase its products.
“Two more branches of the silo are situated in the southern Kandahar and western Herat cities and authorities would soon buy necessary equipment to fully reactivate the said factories,” Maher said.
According to the official, the silo begun its production with baking 200 kg of flour to make bread and cake daily and in the future the capacity would increase to five tons per day.
This is the first-ever state-run production entity that has been reactivated since Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in mid-August.
Presently a total of 130 persons including 12 women are working in the bakery section of the silo to produce bread and cake and the products are sold in 36 stalls across the Kabul city.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) announced on Saturday 95 percent of people in Afghanistan “do not have enough to eat”, as the United States has frozen Afghan government assets worth billions of dollars and international sanctions against the ruling Taliban have plunged the Asian country into a full-blown economic crisis.
The WFP Asia Pacific warned on its official Twitter account that “hunger continues rising in Afghanistan” and that “95% of the population don’t have enough to eat.”
It further said that back in January, “8 in 10 income-earning households experienced a significant decrease in income, w/ #Kabul hit the hardest. Worse still, some were forced to brave the cold month w/ no income at all”.
The UN says that Afghanistan, which is already suffering from high poverty levels, is facing “one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters”.
On Thursday, the WFP announced that “with each passing month, new waves of people are turning to drastic measures to feed their families in Afghanistan”.