The highest UN humanitarian affairs official had a dire message for G20 leaders at a meeting in Rome yesterday: Worry about Afghanistan, because its economy is collapsing and half the population risks not having enough food to eat as the snows have already started to fall.
UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said in an interview with The Associated Press on Friday that “the needs in Afghanistan are skyrocketing.”
Half of Afghan children aged four or younger are at risk of acute malnutrition and there are outbreaks of measles in every single province, he said, describing the outbreaks as “a red light” and “the canary in the mine” for what’s happening in society.
Photo: AFP
Griffiths warned that food insecurity leads to malnutrition, then disease and death, and “absent corrective action” the world would see deaths in Afghanistan.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is feeding 4 million people in Afghanistan, but the UN predicts that because of the dire winter conditions and the economic collapse, it would have to provide food to triple that number — 12 million Afghans — “and that’s massive,” he said.
The WFP this week appealed for US$200 million to finance its operations until the end of the year, and Griffiths urged countries that suspended development assistance for Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover on Aug. 15, including the US and European countries, to transfer that money for desperately needed humanitarian aid.
The EU had already shifted about 100 million euros (US$115.5 million) to humanitarian work.
Griffiths said that the crisis is the result of two large droughts in the past few years, the disruption of services during the conflict between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and the collapse of the economy.
“So, the message that I would give to the leaders of the G20 is worry about economic collapse in Afghanistan, because economic collapse in Afghanistan will, of course, have an exponential effect on the region,” he said. “And the specific issue that I would ask them to focus on first is the issue of getting cash into the economy in Afghanistan — not into the hands of the Taliban — into the hands of the people whose access to their own bank accounts is not frozen.”
Griffiths said it is also critical that frontline health workers, teachers and others get their salaries paid.
He said many ideas are discussed with increasing urgency to get liquidity into the market and his message is that an urgent response is needed this year, not next year in spring.
Among the ideas are physically taking cash into Afghanistan, which Griffiths said has “lots of difficulties,” and using the Afghani currency.
However, the issue is how to get traders to safely provide Afghanis for use by humanitarian organizations, he said.
“They will probably only do that if they think that they can get external currency for those Afghanis,” he said.
Griffiths warned of exponential effects of an economic collapse, saying that the first worry is that if people do not get services, food, schooling for their children and healthcare, they would move, either inside the country or flee Afghanistan to survive.
The second worry is the growing problem of terrorism, “and that is something which usually breeds in times of uncertainty and in times of suffering,” he said. “That would be a terrible legacy to visit all the people of Afghanistan.”
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