Many of the people waiting for assistance in Khwaja Rawash, a middle-class neighborhood near Kabul International Airport, are Afghanistan’s new poor. They used to have decent jobs; now they rely on international aid to survive. The 3,800 Afghanis (just over US$40) they will receive from WFP will help them get through the month.
It’s quieter than the first day of this month’s distribution in that district, Khalid Ahmadzai, a WFP coordination partner on the ground, told CNN. Back then, on May 11th, people climbed over the walls to get inside. WFP says it helped 3,000 households in the district on the first day, with each household housing an average of seven people.
Around 700 people waited patiently for up to two hours last Sunday for the ID check and the money to be handed over.
Ahmadzai says people are desperate. “A few days ago a woman came up to me and said, ‘I want to give you my son for 16,000 afghanis,'” he says, a sum of about $175. “She cried. It was the worst feeling I’ve had in my life.”
He added, “Her son was maybe three or four years old … The feeling she had about his hunger and the economic situation they were in was at a stage where she was asking to sell her son.”
Gunmen from the Taliban who once attacked the Afghan capital are now providing security at the food distribution center.
Her presence underscores a cruel irony from Azima, a teacher in line who is receiving help for the first time in her life. She says the security situation has improved since the Taliban took Kabul last year: “The suicide bombings have stopped. But the economic situation of the people couldn’t be worse.”
Afghanistan’s economic crisis has been looming for years; the result of poverty, conflict and drought. But after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, the US and its allies froze about $7 billion of the country’s foreign exchange reserves and cut off international funding. The move crippled an economy already heavily dependent on aid. Millions of Afghans are unemployed. Government employees were not paid. And food prices have skyrocketed. Nearly half the population – 20 million people – is suffering from acute hunger, according to a United Nations-backed report released this week.
There are fears the crisis could kill more Afghans than 20 years of war.
“Farmers … have told me that in decades of war they have never had to queue for humanitarian aid — until now,” Mary-Ellen McGroarty, WFP’s Afghanistan country director, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in Kabul.
“I’ve met many, many women, even female heads of households, widows who were able to take care of themselves and for them everything just imploded… The drought and the economic crisis… it’s this whole collision of factors that getting together .”
“There is no more work”
In Kabul and other cities, some people experience hunger for the first time.
In line we met Fatima, whose husband cannot find work as a security guard, Aziza, who lost her job as a cleaner at the Labor Ministry, and Azima, the teacher.
Azima had never been unemployed until a Taliban decree closed secondary schools to girls. Now she teaches elementary school classes to make ends meet – but her salary has not yet been paid.
“I work,” she says. “My students were 11th and 12th grade high school students. They’re on vacation right now, so I’m teaching elementary school classes. But our salaries are not paid on time.”
Khotima, a widow whose husband was killed in a suicide bombing four years ago, hopes the money she received from WFP will help her support her six children.
“I used to clean people’s houses, but there’s no work anymore. Every house you go to and ask for work says, ‘No. No money,'” she tells CNN.
“I can’t feed my kids anymore…We don’t have cooking oil for tonight and I owe six months’ rent…I don’t have a husband to help me and my kids. You should let me work so I can buy bread.”
People here are angered by the lack of jobs, leaving them little choice but to rely on handouts. “We want to work with our own hands so that we can eat food that we bought with our own money,” says Haji Noor Ahmad.
Behind him is Allah Noor, a computer science student at Kabul University, who insists: “We don’t want to grow old beggars. We want jobs. We ask the world and our government to help people find jobs.”
The West is under increasing pressure to ease economic restrictions on Afghanistan.
In March, the UN envoy to Kabul, Deborah Lyons, called on the Security Council to cooperate again with the Taliban and prevent the Afghan economy from collapsing.
“The crisis in Afghanistan is becoming an electoral disaster as international donor policies – aimed at economically isolating the Taliban – simultaneously collapse the Afghan economy and push nearly 20 million Afghans into a state of acute food insecurity,” Vicki said Aken, Afghanistan director of the International Rescue Committee, said in a statement.
Malnourished mothers, children
A precarious situation for the poorest in Kabul, who have to scrape together a few hundred Afghans every day to feed their families.
In a tangle of low mud houses on the outskirts of the Afghan capital, Basmina prepares a dinner of eggs, a small bowl of beans, and two flatbreads. She, her husband Waliullah and their six children ate the same lunch – the leftovers are their dinner.
“We don’t have any other food,” she says. “Maybe once a week or every 10 days we also have meat.”
Her children are always hungry, says Basmina. The two eldest, 8 and 10 years old, polish shoes and collect waste paper to sell. They bring home the family’s only income since Waliullah injured his back and can no longer work as a day laborer.
Basmina says the couple’s 10-month-old baby is malnourished. “We don’t have enough food to feed the children and there is no work. I tell them, ‘God will be kind to us one day.’”
Malnutrition is a threat to children across Afghanistan. Hospitals are overwhelmed with starving children even though medical care is becoming scarce.
At the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, the wards are crowded with mothers and babies.
Two-year-old Mohammad lies in a small bed, his emaciated body showing signs of severe malnutrition. His mother Parwana says she only had mother’s milk to feed him; Now she says she can’t afford to eat enough to keep producing milk.
Shazia’s seven-month-old baby Angela has severe pneumonia and malnutrition. “They gave me rice and other foods because I have less milk to breastfeed my child,” she says.
“Unfortunately we don’t have this kind of food at home. If we eat lunch, we don’t eat dinner.”