Nine in 10 Afghans are not consuming enough food: WFP

Ninety-three percent of Afghan families are not consuming sufficient food, the World Food Programme said on Friday.

WFP also said three out of four households are using extreme coping mechanisms, such as skipping meals or preferring to give food to children instead of adults.

The WFP conducted a telephone survey from June 17 to September 5, asking 1,600 random households per month about their food habits. The agency reported a “marked difference” between the period up to the August 15 and then following August 20.

“The portion of families resorting to extreme coping mechanisms, those are things like skipping meals or preferring to give food to children instead of adults or limiting portion sizes to make food last longer had almost doubled”, WFP’s deputy regional director for Asia and the Pacific, Anthea Webb said.

Afghanistan is facing economic collapse after foreign countries and institutions said they would withhold aid and monetary reserves after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan took control of Kabul last month.

“It’s now a race against time and the snow to deliver life-saving assistance to the Afghan people who need it most. We need to be reaching nine million people per month by November if we are to meet our planned target of 14 million by the end of the year,” Webb said, urging donors to fill the 200 million dollars’ appeal ahead of an international aid conference for Afghanistan on September 13.

Many Afghans were struggling to feed their families amid severe drought well before the Islamic Emirate took control and millions may now face starvation with the country isolated and the economy unraveling, aid agencies reported.

“People do not have access to the money they need to buy food, food prices have gone up, fuel prices have gone up. There simply is an inability for the poorest people and very soon the not so poor people to be able to buy enough food to survive”, Webb said.

Malnutrition already affects one in two children under the age of five in Afghanistan, where 14 million people or one-third of the population faces “acute food insecurity,” the WFP says.

Its latest assessment says that 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces showed less food consumption in the last month, the worst-hit being Ghazni, Khost, and Paktika in the east.