KABUL (TIP): Lying in her hospital cot, the 3-year-old girl roamed the room with her gray-green eyes, but her body was listless.
Her mother sat by her bedside, quietly weeping. Just a few months ago, she lost her 5-year-old daughter, Khadija, to the same condition: malnutrition.
Both girls had the same symptoms: thin limbs but swollen hands, feet and belly, signs of a severe type of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency. And now 25-year-old Malika is terrified that Kalsoum, her youngest daughter, will meet the same fate as Khadija.
“I am worried about her, that she might die,” Malika said, wiping her tears with her green headscarf. “My husband is a day laborer. Sometimes there is work, sometimes there isn’t.” The $3-$4.60 he earns on days when he can find work just isn’t enough to feed the family, which also includes three young boys.
Kalsoum is far from alone. In the malnutrition ward in the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health, Afghanistan’s main children’s hospital, all 20 beds — the maximum the hospital can afford — are full.
Across Afghanistan, hunger and malnutrition are rising dramatically.
“More people are suffering from hunger than ever before,” John Aylieff, Afghanistan country director for the World Food Program, told The Associated Press. He said 19 million people — nearly 40% of the population — would be facing acute hunger, “the life-threatening type of hunger,” in the next few months.
Even more worrying is that acute malnutrition, which kills if left untreated, is spiraling.
“Acute malnutrition is at unprecedented levels already,” Aylieff said. “In the next year 5.3 million women and children in this country will need treatment for acute malnutrition, the type of malnutrition which, if not treated,fzar leads rather precipitously to death.”
That is 1.3 million more than in 2022, Aylieff said, when Afghanistan’s economy teetered on the brink of collapse after the U.S.-led coalition’s withdrawal and the Taliban’s seizure of power.
The vast majority are children, according to data in the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification issued Thursday. Children, whose bodies are still developing and therefore have higher nutritional needs, are most at risk when food runs scarce.
Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been buffeted by a myriad of overlapping crises in recent years.
The legacy of four decades of war is compounded by a yearlong closure of border crossings with Pakistan due to a simmering conflict, depriving Afghanistan of its main trade route. Added to that is the forcible return since 2023 of more than 5 million Afghan refugees from neighboring Iran and Pakistan who are putting pressure on limited resources; natural disasters such as drought, floods and earthquakes; and the crisis in the Middle East.
Poverty is the main driving force behind the hunger crisis, with millions simply unable to afford nutritious food. With the crisis in the Middle East impacting economies across the world, Afghanistan has not been immune.
“The price of food has gone up by between 10 and 30% for the basic staple commodities, the commodities that the poor eat. So the poor are being priced out of the market,” Aylieff said.
But one of the most significant factors has been the sharp decline in international aid on which Afghanistan has long relied. The Taliban takeover in 2021 saw direct foreign aid halted almost overnight, driving millions into poverty and hunger.
Funding cuts to humanitarian organizations, including the halting of U.S. aid to programs such as the WFP’s food distribution, have severed a lifeline for millions. The U.N.’s food agency is the largest provider of food assistance in Afghanistan but has just 12% of the funding it had in 2022, Aylieff said.
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