Few Australians can imagine winter in Afghanistan. It arrives with a thud, shocking you out of the slumber of those last deliciously mild autumn days. It then lingers for months and throws down heavy snowfalls that cut off whole regions from the world.
I’ve never particularly feared winter in Afghanistan. This year is different. This year I approach winter with dread like never before because I know it will roll in and heap an unfathomable misery on people already stretched to their limits.
Afghanistan is in the middle of its worst hunger crisis in living memory. The that more than half of the 40 million population are facing acute levels of malnutrition and that children are dying due to starvation. Among this terrible number, almost are at the very brink of starvation. It has forced untold numbers of children into begging, dangerous and exploitative work and to be pulled from school.
And within days, we will begin our long trudge through and snowfall will prevent access to remote areas and cut them off for up to four months. We are very quickly running out of time to get food aid into villages and communities that will soon become inaccessible.
A child and woman in Afghanistan. Source: World Vision
The situation was already bad before the Taliban took control of Kabul in August. Drought – probably worsened by climate change – and conflict that had displaced tens of thousands had created the initial conditions for this crisis. But an already bad situation has worsened significantly.
International funding that supported crucial sectors, such as health, education and development, has largely been suspended; there has been an implosion of the health system due to the World Bank halting normal funding for salaries and running costs of hospitals and clinics; sanctions, counterterrorism measures and restrictions placed on cashflows to Afghanistan have resulted in a funding and liquidity crisis. The people of Afghanistan are now paying a punishing price for these restrictions which have created a new class of urban hungry who are jobless and grappling with an economy in free fall. Half of all children aged under five, around 3.2 million, are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of the year. without immediate life-saving treatment.
Food programs like those we run, which meet the needs of many thousands, are being outpaced by the growing numbers of people facing starvation. Many of the previous activities run to protect vulnerable children have also not been able to restart, following the change in national leadership.
My organisation, World Vision, has been on the ground for 20 years doing a range of humanitarian and development work, but the activities that are most critical at this moment are providing emergency nutrition via 15 mobile health clinics. Of the 3600 children aged under five we treated in clinics in Herat and Ghor provinces in October, 808 had moderate-acute or severe- acute malnutrition, while 2694 received treatment for acute respiratory infections. It is heartbreaking to visit these clinics and meet young mothers who share stories of their struggles to survive on almost nothing.
The medical staff there serve the most vulnerable, including people displaced by conflict and who live in abject poverty. They measure the arms of children as an indicator of how malnourished they are and send the weakest to specialist nutrition wards in hospitals. Those wards are filling with children, sometimes several to a bed, and deaths are increasingly commonplace.
The other action we take is to distribute food in the remote and mountainous provinces where we work in western Afghanistan. All these are marked ‘emergency’ red on a map managed by food security experts who have assessed the food situation. In fact, most of Afghanistan is now red – and just one step away from ‘famine’ black.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has mapped out areas with highest food insecurity in Afghanistan. Source: IPC
In response to this crisis, thousands of people each day are trying to leave Afghanistan to escape the crisis or to find work and send money home. If unaddressed, this crisis could end up on Europe’s doorstep in the way the Syrian conflict did back in 2015 when conflict and food aid cuts provoked mass migration.
So, just as it took a massive international operation to help thousands evacuate Kabul after the Taliban take-over, it is going to take a massive effort from the humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and agencies still in Afghanistan, to feed people over the coming months. They are ready to scale up.
Although more than $US1 billion ($AU1.38 billion) was recently pledged by donor governments after an outpouring of support and global attention, Afghanistan’s humanitarian appeal remains underfunded. More than $US200m ($AU276m) per month will be needed just to keep the food pipeline running. We have so far reached more than 120,000 people with food assistance since the start of October, doubling rations for those who will soon be cut off, but many more need to be reached.
The timeline and trajectory of this emergency are beginning to become clear. In just under a week, people in many countries will be sitting down for Christmas dinner and gift-giving only to be confronted by images on their televisions of starving, emaciated children in impoverished Afghan villages. It will become the Boxing-Day-tsunami-equivalent of starvation. There will be an outpouring of hand-wringing and also generosity. But by that stage, it will be too late. Getting food trucks through the mountain passes will be next to impossible. And children weakened by malnourishment will already be dying from the cold, from diseases like tuberculosis and respiratory infections.
When famine was finally declared in Somalia in 2012, many of the 260,000 people who eventually died had already done so. The scale of this crisis may be worse. We must not let that happen again.
By the time you see TV pictures of starving children in hospitals, it will already be too late since those girls and boys represent the many living in remote areas who will die invisible deaths. In this day and age, we should never ever let any child starve, or witness families having to make the impossible choices they are now being forced to make.
Asuntha Charles is the national director of World Vision Afghanistan
