Afghans threatened with starvation

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has warned of impending shortages in the provision of humanitarian aid to 8.4 million people in Afghanistan who are dependent on donations of food. "Attacks on aid convoys in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the early onset of winter make it increasingly difficult to get supplies through to the desperate people”, said the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, on Tuesday in Göttingen. "Afghanistan is threatened with a winter of starvation.”

The number of attacks on aid-workers has doubled within a year. Since January 2008 30 aid-workers have been killed and 80 members of staff from aid agencies abducted. 26 convoys of the World Food Programme of the United Nations have been attacked. Supplies with which 100,000 people could have been fed for one month have been destroyed.

2,000 people died of cold last winter and this year even more are facing the same threat, since the routes have become more dangerous and many roads are barely passable owing to heavy snowfalls, said Delius.

The impoverished rural population is more dependent on aid-supplies than ever before because a drought in central and north Afghanistan has meant that the wheat harvest decreased by 36 percent as compared with last year. The people also urgently need more fodder for their cattle. In the past two hard winters 1.5 million animals (approximately ten percent of total livestock in Afghanistan) perished miserably for lack of fodder.

"The Taliban want at all costs to prevent the supply of food to Afghans”, warned Delius. Taliban fighters make no distinction between convoys with aid supplies for the civilian population and transports with supplies for the foreign troops ISAF) stationed in Afghanistan. Only last Monday an attack on a supply depot of the ISAF in the Pakistani town of Peshawar brought the deaths of two people and the destruction of a dozen lorries.

About 75 percent of the supplies are brought through Pakistan and have to be transported by lorry over the mountain passes of the Khyber and Chaman. On these routes more than 100 lorry-drivers have been killed since January 2007 and 25 drivers have been abducted since mid-October 2008. On 10th November 2008 twelve lorries with aid supplies from the World Food Programme were ransacked on the Khyber Pass.