Facing Economic Collapse, Afghanistan Stuck with Starvation

SHAH WALI KOT, Afghanistan — One by one, women flocked to the adobe clinic, the frames of hungry children peering out from under the folds of their pale grey, blue, and pink burqas.

Many had walked for over an hour in this dull region of southern Afghanistan, where parched earth meets a pale sky, and were desperate for medicine to pump life into their children’s constricted veins. For months, his once-daily meals had become less frequent as the harvest had failed, the wells had dried up, and the shopkeepers had run out of flour credit.

Now, as the fresh air cooled, the truth was emerging: Their children might not survive the winter.

“I’m afraid this winter will be worse than we can imagine,” said 40-year-old Laltak, who likes many women in rural Afghanistan.

About four months after the Taliban took power, Afghanistan is on the verge of mass starvation, aid groups say. threatens to kill a million children this winter – a toll dwarfs the total number Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of war over the past 20 years.

While Afghanistan has suffered from malnutrition for decades, the country’s hunger crisis has drastically worsened in recent months. This winter, an estimated 22.8 million people – more than half the population – are expected to face potentially life-threatening levels of food insecurity. an analysis by the United Nations World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization. Of these, 8.7 million people are approaching famine – the worst stage of a food crisis.

Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign. It’s about the economic collapse that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban took power. Almost overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid backing the previous Western-backed government disappeared, and US sanctions on the Taliban has isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and hampering humanitarian aid efforts.

Across the country, millions of Afghans, from day laborers to doctors and teachers, have lived for months without a fixed or any income. The prices of food and other essential goods have soared beyond the reach of many families. Skinny children and anemic mothers flocked to the malnutrition wards of hospitals, many of which were deprived of the medical supplies that donor aid had once provided.

Combining its economic woes, the country is facing one of the worst droughts in decades that has withered fields, starved livestock and caused dried up irrigation canals. Afghanistan’s wheat harvest is expected to be up to 25 percent below average According to the United Nations, this year, many farmers in rural areas, where roughly 70 percent of the population live, have given up on cultivating their land.

Now, with the freezing winter weather approaching, the crisis is potentially damaging both to the new Taliban government and to the United States, which faces increasing pressure to ease worsening economic restrictions, as humanitarian agencies warn that a million children could die. crisis.

“We need to separate politics from humanitarian necessity,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, World Food Program country director for Afghanistan. “In the current crisis in Afghanistan, millions of women, children and men are innocent people condemned to a winter of utter despair and potentially death.”

In Shah Wali Kot, a barren region of Kandahar province, drought and economic collapse combined into one perfect storm.

Small farmers lived for decades on the income from winter, stored wheat from the summer harvest and the sale of onions in the market. But this year it was barely enough to support families during the autumn months. Unable to find food in the winter, some people migrated to the cities in hopes of finding work or to other counties to seek refuge with their relatives.

In one of the clinic’s two mud huts, run by the Afghan Red Crescent and supported by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Laltak clung to his granddaughter’s skinny body as if bracing himself for the challenges he knew this winter. would bring.

His family has no wheat, no firewood, There is no money to buy food. They exhausted the support of their close relatives, who could not even feed their own families.

“We have nothing,” Laltak said in an interview at the end of October.

The Times was unable to talk to them about their children’s health, as she and most of the mothers interviewed did not have cell phones or telephone service in their villages.

According to the United Nations, thirty percent more Afghans faced crisis-level food shortages in September and October compared to the same period last year. The number of Afghans in crisis is expected to reach record levels in the coming months.

“It’s never been this bad,” said Sifatullah Sifat, chief physician of the Shamsul Haq clinic on the outskirts of Kandahar city, where malnutrition cases have doubled in recent months. “Donors are sending medicine but still not enough.”

Every morning at 10 am, a crowd of mothers carrying masses of skeletal children in the hallway of the malnutrition unit.

In an exam room in October, 20-year-old Zarmina hugged her 18-month-old son while her 3-year-old daughter stood behind her, clutching her blue burqa. As the Taliban seized power and her husband’s job as a day laborer dried up, her family mostly survived on bread and tea – meals that gnawed at their children’s stomachs.

“They cry for food. I wish I could bring them something but we have nothing,” said Zarmina, who was six months pregnant and severely anaemic.

Zarmina’s son was weak after weeks of diarrhea. A nurse stared blankly at the wall and stopped at the red color as she wrapped a color-coded measuring tape used to diagnose malnutrition around her rail-slim arm.

When the nurse told Zarmina that she had to go to the hospital for treatment, another mother burst into the room and collapsed to the floor, asking for help for her infant daughter.

“It’s been almost a week, I can’t find medicine for him,” she pleaded.

The nurse begged him to wait: Her daughter’s malnutrition was considered moderate.

Ever since the Taliban took power, the United States and other Western donors have grappled with sensitive questions about how to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan without legitimizing the new regime by lifting sanctions or putting money directly into the hands of the Taliban.

“We believe it is crucial to maintain our sanctions against the Taliban but also to find ways for legitimate humanitarian aid to reach the Afghan people. That’s exactly what we’re doing,” said the US deputy secretary of the treasury. Wally Adeyemo He told the Senate Banking Committee in October.

But as the humanitarian situation worsened, aid organizations urged the United States to act faster.

U.S. officials showed some flexibility in loosening the economic stalemate in Afghanistan last week when the World Bank board, including the United States, moved to release $280 million in frozen endowments for the World Food Program and UNICEF. Yet the total is just a fraction of the $1.5 billion frozen by the World Bank due to pressure from the US Treasury after the Taliban took control.

It remains unclear how the released funds will be transferred to Afghanistan. Despite recent letters from the US Treasury Department reassuring foreign banks that they can process humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, many financial institutions continue to fear exposure to US sanctions.

The Taliban government has repeatedly called on the Biden administration to ease economic restrictions and has worked with international organizations to provide some assistance. But already, millions of Afghans have been pushed across the border.

At Mirwais District Hospital in Kandahar this fall, children suffering from malnutrition and disease flocked to the worn metal beds of the children’s ward. An eerie silence filled the intensive care unit. The great room was too weak for the children to cry, visibly dilapidated, out of breath, and their skin hung from the protruding bones.

“I wanted to take her to the hospital earlier,” said 40-year-old Rooqia, looking at her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Amina. “But I had no money, I couldn’t come.”

Like many of the other mothers and grandmothers in the ward, they had come from western Kandahar, where irrigation canals have dried up in the past two years and more recently the cellars have emptied. Amina began to shrink – her skin became so dry that her life-sustaining vitamins were robbed.

On a nearby bed, 2-year-old Madina let out a soft moan as her 50-year-old grandmother Harzato readjusted her sweater. Harzato had taken the girl to the local pharmacist, begging for medicine three times, until he told her there was nothing else he could do: Only a doctor could save the child.

“We were so far from the hospital, I was worried and depressed,” Harzato said. “I thought you couldn’t make it.”

Yaqoob Akbary contributed news from Kandahar, Wali Arian from Istanbul and Safiullah Padshah from Kabul.