Significant hunger crisis looms in Afghanistan
The World Food Programme says 22.8 million Afghans face acute hunger risk this winter, with 8.7 million at emergency levels — the highest in a decade of tracking — as drought, conflict and economic collapse compound.
Afghanistan is on track to become the world's largest humanitarian crisis, surpassing Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen, according to a new food-security assessment cited by the World Food Programme (WFP). The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report found 22.8 million people — more than half the country — face acute hunger risk during the November 2021 to March 2022 lean season, a 37% increase from the previous assessment issued in April 2021.
Of that total, 8.7 million people are projected to reach emergency hunger levels, the highest figure recorded in ten years of IPC analysis in Afghanistan. The report also flags 1 million children at risk of severe acute malnutrition and a further 2 million at risk of moderate acute malnutrition, with about 700,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women in need of nutrition support.
What changed
The WFP attributes the surge to a compounding set of shocks: the Taliban's takeover of the country following the international military withdrawal in August 2021, a collapse of public services, widespread job losses, a cash shortage compounded by a $200-per-week withdrawal limit, and soaring prices. Severe drought — driven by a double-dip La Niña climate pattern and following previous droughts in the prior three years — has devastated harvests, while international sanctions and a banking-sector collapse have restricted the flow of money into the country.
The response
We cannot allow Afghanistan to be a collective failure.
The WFP said the entire country will need support and called the situation urgent. The agency said it is feeding roughly 4 to 5 million people a month, up sharply from about 1 million earlier in 2021, and is planning to scale up further heading into 2022 to reach almost 23 million people. To do that, WFP said it may require as much as $220 million per month, distributing rations of wheat flour, peas, oil and salt.
What it signals
The scale WFP is describing — more than half a nation's population facing acute hunger within a single lean season, with the worst emergency-level figure in a decade of measurement — reflects how quickly a change in government, a banking freeze and a drought can compound into what WFP itself calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis, ahead of longer-running crises in Yemen and Syria. The $220 million monthly funding figure WFP cites is a direct measure of the gap between the emergency's scale and the resources committed to it at the time of this report.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by the World Food Programme. It restores a story originally published on this site in October 2021; figures are as reported at the time.