KABUL (Reuters) – Almost all Afghans do not have enough to eat and a failing economy could tip Afghanistan’s increasingly dire situation under Taliban rule into catastrophe next year, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says.
WFP surveys showed an estimated 98 percent of Afghans are not eating enough, with seven in 10 families resorting to borrowing food, which pushes them deeper into poverty, a spokesperson for the agency told reporters.
The abrupt withdrawal of foreign aid following the Taliban victory in August left Afghanistan’s fragile economy on the brink of collapse, with prices for food, fuel and other basic staples rising rapidly out of reach for many.
“The spiraling economic crisis, the conflict and drought has meant the average family can now barely cope,” Tomson Phiri told a Geneva briefing. “We have a huge amount to do to stop this crisis from becoming a catastrophe.”
According to the WFP, 22.8 million people in Afghanistan face acute food insecurity and 8.7 million Afghans face emergency levels of food insecurity out of a population of 40 million.
So far in 2021, 15 million Afghans received food assistance from the WFP, with seven million just in November.
The WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organization and the largest focused on hunger and food security.
The organization said that it plans next year to increase its food assistance to reach all of the nearly 23 million people in Afghanistan facing food insecurity across all of the country’s 34 provinces.
Separately, Nada al-Nashif, the UN’s deputy high commissioner for human rights, said Afghan families faced “severe poverty and hunger,” with many pushed into desperate measures, including child labor, early marriage, and “even the sale of children.”
The unfolding crisis has also affected the already fragile banking system in the country, especially with billions of dollars in Afghan assets frozen by the U.S. since the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban in August.