Even though much of what’s happening in Afghanistan isn’t making headlines now, the situation is still critical for Americans and others attempting to leave the country. Circumstances are also increasingly dire for ordinary Afghans.
NBC News reports millions of them now face a daily fight with hunger. For weeks, humanitarian organizations have been warning of an imminent disaster as the Taliban have been failing to feed the nation’s poor amid an economy on the verge of collapse.
Earlier this month, Omar Abdi, deputy executive director for programs at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) cautioned, “We will have a humanitarian catastrophe.” “There are millions of people who are going to starve.
And there is winter coming, there is COVID raging, and the whole social system collapsed, so not just only health, but also other social services. Food shortage, medical shortage. And we heard that there will be fuel shortages. So the whole country is going to collapse if they don’t get support immediately.”
According to recent surveys conducted by the World Food Program, the United Nations’ food assistance branch, 95 percent of households in Afghanistan are not consuming enough food, with parents having to eat less and skip meals to feed their children.
“As more families struggle to put food on the table, the nutritional health of mothers and their children is getting worse by the day,” Hervé Ludovic De Lys, UNICEF representative in Afghanistan, said in a statement on Oct. 5th. FULL REPORT
