‘Countdown to catastrophe’: starving Afghan families forced to sell their children

Millions of Afghans will face starvation this winter unless urgent action is taken to get aid to the Taliban-ruled nation, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.

As the crisis intensifies, “the number of beggars throughout Afghanistan’s major cities – including children – has risen”, said The Guardian. For the first time, the urban population is experiencing “similar rates of food insecurity to rural communities”, in “a shifting pattern of hunger in the country”.

Impoverished Afghans have started “selling their possessions and animals to buy food”, as well as “chopping down trees to sell wood and rooting through rubbish for scraps of food”, The Times added. The situation has become “so desperate that some are surrendering their children to debt collectors”.

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‘Migration and starvation’

According to the WFP, more than half of the total population of 40m people face food insecurity, with 3.2m children aged under five at risk of acute malnutrition.

Already, 95% of households in Afghanistan are not getting enough to eat, surveys show. And the combined effects of “conflict, drought and an economic downturn that is severely affecting livelihoods and people’s access to food” are expected to worsen as a “harsh winter looms”, The Guardian said.

“Afghanistan is now among the world’s worst humanitarian crises – if not the worst – and food security has all but collapsed,” said the WFP’s executive director David Beasley. “We are on a countdown to catastrophe.”

In the coming months, “millions of Afghans will be forced to choose between migration and starvation”, he warned.

Before the Taliban returned to power this summer, “40% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product came from foreign aid”, said The Times.

But “the takeover made the country a global pariah once again”, the paper added. “Western powers suspended aid and froze billions in Afghan central bank assets”, and “international lenders such as the World Bank stopped payments”.

The extend of the resulting crisis has been highlighted by reports of “a family of eight orphaned children who recently starved to death” on the streets of Kabul, said The Telegraph.

The unnamed children, all of whom were aged under ten, were “left to fend for themselves following the deaths of their mother and father”, the paper added. And “these kinds of stories are likely to become more common” in Afghanistan, where “the looming catastrophe will soon eclipse crises in Yemen and Syria”.

Following the withdrawal of Western support and the Taliban takeover, “it seems there is no end to the agony for Afghan children”, said Orlaith Minogue, Save the Children’s senior conflict and humanitarian advocacy adviser.

“After decades of war and suffering, they now face the worst hunger crisis in their country’s history,” she continued. “The situation is already desperate. We see young children in our clinics every day who are wasted from severe malnutrition because they have nothing but scraps of bread to eat.”

‘Release our money’

In September, “more than $1bn (£720m) was pledged by the international community at a conference in Geneva to support Afghans”, the BBC said. “About a third” of this funding was set aside for the WFP, but the organisation warned this week that “the UN humanitarian assistance programme remains only a third funded”, the broadcaster added.

According to the WFP, as much as $220m (£160m) per month may be needed to meet the challenge of feeding Afghans over the winter. Qu Dongyu, director of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said it was “urgent that we act efficiently and effectively to speed up and scale up our delivery in Afghanistan”.

If the agency is unable to ramp up deliveries before “winter cuts off a large part of the country”, he warned, “millions of people” will go hungry during the “freezing” months.

The Taliban has blamed the US and Joe Biden’s administration for the growing catastrophe.

The US president has “already frozen about $9bn in Afghan government assets”, CBS News reported. And, like other Western leaders, he “says any future financial support depends on the Taliban proving that it has moderated since it was last in power”.

Afghanistan's “international isolation”, combined with a “block on national cash reserves”, has led the Taliban to “restrict cash withdrawals at banks”, the news site said. Many Afghans do not have access to savings at a time when most “haven't been paid their wages for months”.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, told the broadcaster that “on the one hand they say a million children will die, but on the other, the US are holding our money”.

“The US should release our money so we can save more children,” he said.

The scenes of misery across Afghanistan resemble those seen under the Taliban regime between 1996 and 2001, when “millions of Afghans lived in poverty and on the brink of starvation”, The Guardian said.

Now, after an expensive foreign occupation lasting two decades, “fears are mounting that a similar situation could arise” again.