8/3/2002
UN Food Agency Announces Innovative Afghan Rehabilitation Programme

With food aid now successfully reaching about 6.6 million people in Afghanistan, WFP is set to shift the focus of its operations from relief to rehabilitation. The Agency has announced a new nine-month emergency operation which will use innovative food aid projects to help millions of Afghans re-establish their shattered lives and build a future for their devastated country.

The $285 million operation requiring an estimated 544,000 metric tonnes of food aid is set to start on April 1st. The programme will continue to deliver emergency food aid as well as helping to lay the foundations for rebuilding the country.

"Not only do the Afghan people need emergency food aid, but most of the country will have to be rebuilt from the bottom up," said WFP executive director Catherine Bertini at a press conference announcing the operation. The series of innovative projects is designed to address the major challenges facing the National Afghanistan Interim Government.

The bakeries run by Afghan women are probably WFP's best known existing project. Supplied with flour by WFP they provide a means of getting food to some of the poorest families. In the capital Kabul, there are 21 such bakeries while the 20 bakeries in Mazar-I-Sharif, that used to provide jobs for 160 women and feed 4,500 families are set to reopen shortly having been forced to close during the fighting. WFP now has plans to extend its bakeries to other cities in response to need.

Many of those working in WFP's bakeries are destitute war widows. They produce traditional Afghan flat bread at about one sixth of market price while providing the bakers with some kind of income.

Not all Afghans fleeing the drought and fighting became refugees abroad. UN estimates suggest that at the beginning of 2002 there were about a million who had moved into cities or else were huddled in camps around the country. Now that security has improved in many parts of Afghanistan WFP is encouraging them to return to their villages and giving them packages of 150 kg of food to help them survive the transition. The aid package also contains tools and seeds.

Other parts of the WFP package will benefit the Interim Administration by providing short-term food rations to civil servants, whose salaries are currently among the lowest in the world. Other food aid will go to women for attending non-formal education and to farmers who take part in schemes to rehabilitate damaged irrigation systems.

Food at school encourages children's attendance and addresses hunger to facilitate successful learning so WFP are also expanding their school feeding projects to cater for a million Afghan children.

But despite the success of many feeding programmes it appears that relief is still not reaching the most remote northern parts of the country where malnutrition is still very bad. The medical charity, Médicins Sans Frontières recently reported that a recent assessment of the population in the Sar-e-Pol camp found more children in feeding centres than ever before. They report that the number of severely malnourished have increased and that mortality rates have doubled. Of all the families they surveyed, almost half had not received any food aid over the past year.

Prospects are poor for a population that is selling its belongings, leaving their homes in large numbers, and which, by and large, has no land or seeds to prepare for recovery, they say.