The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.N.: Food shortage poses severe threat
The plight of the Afghan people came into stark relief Monday when top United Nations officials warned that millions of people could run out of food before the arrival of winter and 1 million children could die if their immediate needs are not met.
Secretary-general António Guterres, speaking at a high-level U.N. conference in Geneva convened to address the crisis, said that since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the nation’s poverty rate is soaring, basic public services are close to collapse and, in the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless after being forced to flee fighting.
“After decades of war, suffering and insecurity, they face perhaps their most perilous hour,” Guterres said, adding that 1 in 3 Afghans do not know where they will get their next meal.
Speaking to the news media Monday afternoon, Guterres said more than $1 billion in aid pledges had been made at the meeting by the international community. Linda Thomas-greenfield, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, promised $64 million in new funding for food and medical aid.
Why it matters
With the prospect of humanitarian catastrophe long looming over the nation, it now poses an immediate threat to the nation’s children.
“Nearly 10 million girls and boys depend on humanitarian assistance just to survive,” Henrietta Fore, executive director of UNICEF, said at the conference. “At least 1 million children will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year and could die without treatment.”
Even before the Taliban swept across the country and took control of the government, Afghanistan was confronting a dire food crisis as drought enveloped the nation.
The World Food Program estimates that 40% of crops are lost. The price of wheat has gone up by 25%, and the aid agency’s own food stock is expected to run out by the end of September.
What it means
During the conference, the U.N. said it needed $606 million in emergency funding to address the immediate crisis, while acknowledging that money alone will not be enough. The organization has pressed the Taliban to provide assurances that aid workers can go about their business safely. By the end of the gathering, international pledges had surpassed the amount requested.
But even as the Taliban sought to make that pledge, the U.N.’S human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, also speaking in Geneva, said Afghanistan was in a “new and perilous phase” since the militant Islamist group seized power.
“In contradiction to assurances that the Taliban would uphold women’s rights, over the past three weeks, women have instead been progressively excluded from the public sphere,” she told the Human Rights Council in Geneva, a warning that the Taliban would need to use more than words to demonstrate their commitment to aid workers’ safety.