The World Food Programme has warned that Afghanistan is on the brink of an unprecedented hunger crisis, and that cuts in humanitarian aid are threatening the lives of children. John Ayliffe, the agency’s director in Afghanistan, said children are already dying because of a lack of assistance, and that child deaths could rise in the coming months.<\/p>\n
According to him, World Food Programme teams have been forced over the past three months to turn away everyone who came to nutrition centres because they had no food supplies. Ayliffe said that at a clinic in Herat, women with severely malnourished children were waiting in the corridors, and some of those children would not survive.<\/p>\n
The World Food Programme says malnutrition levels in Afghanistan have reached the highest ever recorded. On the basis of this warning, severe drought, earthquakes, flash floods and economic stagnation have left more than 12 million people facing acute hunger, with women and children hit hardest.<\/p>\n
The agency added that its complaints and concerns hotline receives about 140,000 calls a year. According to the World Food Programme, emergency calls from women rose by 60 per cent from June to December last year.<\/p>\n
Ayliffe said the level of despair among families has reached a worrying point. He said some women are thinking about suicide; one woman has gone without food to feed her children and decided to give her 12-year-old daughter in forced marriage to a 40-year-old drug addict, and a father in one family sold his kidney to buy food.<\/p>\n
The World Food Programme also said extreme weather events have made the crisis worse. According to the agency, recent floods in Nuristan killed dozens of people and destroyed villages; in western Afghanistan, several young people have also died from thirst.<\/p>\n
The agency says only 12 per cent of the funding it needs in Afghanistan is currently in place. According to Ayliffe, the closure of Pakistan’s border and disruption along the Strait of Hormuz have complicated the delivery of aid, and getting shipments through alternative routes via nine countries and the Caspian Sea takes up to three months longer.<\/p>\n
The World Food Programme, one of the UN’s key humanitarian agencies in food security, has repeatedly warned in recent years about the spread of hunger and malnutrition in Afghanistan. Herat in western Afghanistan and Nuristan in the east are among the provinces that have faced simultaneous pressure from poverty and natural disasters in recent months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
World Food Programme warns of worsening hunger in Afghanistan, with aid cuts threatening children and more deaths expected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-social-affairs","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}