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UN food agency alarmed by Afghan food, fuel prices
An official with the U.N. food agency warned Friday that with Russia’s war in Ukraine taking an increasing toll on the global economy, the ripples of that conflict will further increase food and fuel prices in Afghanistan.
Currently, as many as 95% of the country’s 38 million people don’t have enough to eat or money to buy food, The Associated Press reported.
Shelley Thakral, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, said that food prices in Afghanistan rose nearly 40% over the last eight months.
The WFP has spent $1 billion feeding millions of Afghans this year but needs another $1.6 billion, Thakral added.
“The worrying thing, I think and this includes Afghanistan as well as all the other hunger spots across the world, is the rise in food and fuel prices,” said Thakral.
So far, donor countries have not sidelined Afghanistan but she said they “have to dig deeper” as Europe deals with the shockwaves of the war and the 3.2 million refugees who have fled Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on February 24.
Thakral’s remarks echoed those of U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi, who warned during a visit to Kabul on Tuesday that the war in Ukraine could siphon off money from humanitarian crisis elsewhere, including in Afghanistan, and that soaring food prices could cripple humanitarian efforts.
While most of Afghanistan’s wheat supplies come from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Thakral said the increasing food and fuel cost as a result of the war could add up to 20% to the costs of providing humanitarian assistance, AP reported.
When the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) swept to power in August, international donor money, which paid more than 80% percent of Afghanistan’s bills, dried up and the country’s economy went into free fall.
There was food on Kabul markets on Friday but Masihullah, standing by his small grocery stall, said no one has money. Most people don’t have jobs, Masihullah said.
A sack of flour costs nearly $28 and most Afghans are now below the poverty line, which means they earn $1.90 a day or less, AP reported.
Thakral said 80% of Afghans are in debt because they have had to borrow to pay for food or medicines and even working Afghans look to the WFP for food aid because they don’t make enough to be able to afford the food on the market.
A Human Rights Watch report released Thursday said that since January, about 13,000 newborns have died from malnutrition and hunger-related diseases in Afghanistan and 3.5 million children need nutritional support.
“If the countries we import food from face a challenge, we face a challenge,” said Masihullah.
“There is war between Russia and Ukraine, so we are affected … there is a high increase in prices of oil and wheat.”
A U.K. pledging summit to be held later this month expects to raise $4.4 billion to stave off a worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, said Thakral.
“Right now in Afghanistan, what we need to sustain is the attention on the people here,” she said.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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