Famine could strike Afghanistan this winter

About 19.2 million Afghans, more than a third of the country's population, are threatened by an acute food supply crisis, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warned on Tuesday. "During the winter period from November to April, the number of people facing acute food insecurity is expected to reach 19.2 million," said Olga Cherevko, OCHA's spokesperson for Afghanistan, who joined the press briefing in Geneva via video link from Kabul. She added that of these, five million people are expected to face hunger at emergency level, "meaning they are on the brink of famine."

According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, 15.9 million people were already living with "crisis" level or worse food shortages in September and October, 3.4 million of them at emergency level. The UN fears that next year more than four million children between six months and five years of age will need treatment for acute malnutrition.

Afghanistan's crisis is being driven by last year's deadly earthquakes, this year's climate disasters, and the millions of Afghans deported from Iran and Pakistan since 2023. The situation is made worse by the fact that about a third of the country's nutrition centers have closed or suspended operations, "largely due to budget cuts." "If these services disappear, the consequences could be irreversible, especially for children," Cherevko warned. She said the crisis is not only about whether food exists, but also about whether people can access it, whether they have income, whether they can reach basic services, and whether they can survive the next shock. Humanitarian aid is therefore needed, but Afghanistan also requires sustained investment in agriculture, rural livelihoods, local markets, water supply, healthcare, and in enabling women to take part in economic life. "We need to act before winter, not wait until families have exhausted all their reserves," the spokesperson urged.

Afghanistan is one of the countries where Ukrainian grain has directly saved lives. In the autumn of 2022, during the Black Sea Grain Initiative, ships chartered by the UN World Food Programme carried tens of thousands of tons of Ukrainian wheat from Odesa to Afghanistan; for instance, the BC Vanessa alone delivered 30,000 tons in a single voyage. Today, this route essentially no longer exists. Russia withdrew from the grain deal, and recently shelled the ports of Odesa with missiles for two consecutive nights, destroying, according to Kyiv, 60,000 tons of grain intended for export. This summer it intensified its attacks on the large deep-water ports of Odesa again, and Ukraine's largest grain exporter, Kernel, halted operations at the port of Chornomorsk. On October 16, at the EU summit, Volodymyr Zelensky said that Black Sea grain shipments are currently not possible because of Russian attacks, and therefore asked Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary to allow grain to be transported overland toward Western Europe.

The Kremlin is thus not only bombing Ukrainian cities, but also cutting off one of the world's largest grain exporters from its buyers, and the price is always paid by the poorest. This is nothing new in the history of Muscovy: between 1932 and 1933, Stalin starved millions of Ukrainian peasants to death during the Holodomor, and today's Russia uses hunger as a weapon in the same way the Soviet Union once did, because it does not care how many people die as a result. Moscow is not the only cause of Afghanistan's tragedy — the UN cites earthquakes, drought and reduced aid — but in a winter when five million people stand on the brink of famine, every sunken grain ship and every bombed port silo counts double.

Ugar