Food aid arrives - for the lucky

9 Jan, 2002 11:00 AM4 mins to read

KABUL - The United Nations food agency started aid operations yesterday in the western city of Herat for the first time since September, providing enough food to feed 340,000 people for a month in the city and 324,000 in the nearby Maslakh refugee camp.

But the World Food Programme said hundreds of thousands more were desperately hungry around Kandahar and other areas in which it was too dangerous for aid agencies to work.

Tens of thousands of Afghans are facing starvation and surviving only by eating grass, say aid officials.

Years of war, drought and Taleban rule have left many dead and even more sick and starving. Aid has not reached many remote areas.

In the northern mountainous region of Abdullah Gan, a former front line between the Taleban and the Northern Alliance, the situation is desperate.

About 10,000 people there are living on little more than grass.

Bonavash, the most accessible village in Abdullah Gan, is starving.

Villagers have resorted to eating bread made from grass and trace amounts of barley flour. Babies whose mothers' milk has dried up are fed grass porridge.

Many have died, more are sick.

Nearly everyone has diarrhoea or a hacking cough. Many are too weak to stand. Others cannot leave their homes. Some children have soft, bloated bellies. When the pain becomes unbearable, their mothers tie rags around their stomachs to try to ease the pressure.

One man is so weak he cannot move. Last week, he went blind.

"We are waiting to die. If food does not come, if the situation does not change, we will eat this ... until we die," said Ghalam Raza, a 42-year-old man with a hacking cough, pain in his stomach and bleeding bowels.

People in more distant areas, days away by donkey, are worse off, say aid workers and Bonavash residents who have been there.

They describe people who do not even have barley to mix with the grass and who eat it straight from the ground, people whose stomachs are rock hard from hunger, people dying in front of them.

"If we cannot get aid within the month, we will be as bad as they are," said Dawood, the commander in Bonavash.

Abdullah Gan is "a humanitarian crisis", said Ahmed Idrees Rahmani, the International Rescue Committee's acting northern Afghanistan coordinator.

Many in the region are totally dependent on rain for irrigation and are too far from any road for aid to be delivered easily.

Thousands of bags of wheat flour meant to save the people of Abdullah Gan sit stacked in a compound in the small town of Zari, 4 1/2 hours away by donkey along mountain trails.

The World Food Programme (WFP) spent two weeks trucking 1016 tonnes of flour to Zari, the nearest outpost accessible by road, but never told the aid groups that would distribute it.

Aid workers found out only because residents told them. They rushed to the area to try to figure out the logistics of distribution.

The wheat is improperly stored. If it rains or snows, much of it will be damaged.

UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said: "The agencies have managed to get record amounts of food into Afghanistan but then getting it from depots to remote villages where it is most needed has not been easy."

WFP spokeswoman Abby Spring said: "With different warlords controlling different roads, there are some areas where we just can't go.

"We have the food, the cash, the trucks, but what we don't have is the security, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to provide food to some communities."

This means that even though help is there, it may not solve the problems in Abdullah Gan.

Each family is entitled to three bags of flour - a three-month supply - but aid groups cannot get it to them.

It would cost nearly $US10 ($23) a bag to rent donkeys to haul the food into the mountains to the nearest villages, such as Bonavash.

"Reaching these people is tough," said Rahmani. "Most of them need air-dropped food."

In Bonavash, Fatima sits outside her house boiling grass in water to soften it. She then mixes it with a handful of barley flour, and forms it into a patty to bake as bread.

Her family have been eating like this for more than a year. Two of her young children have died.

Her husband, Mir Hossin, said: "We have nothing else. No cooking oil, no rice, no flour, no tea."

- REUTERS

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