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Malnourished children are treated at the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Kabul
Photo: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP
In Afghanistan, more and more starving, vulnerable children are being admitted to hospitals.
According to the UN, 1.1 million children under the age of five will suffer from severe malnutrition this year.
The United Nations and other aid organizations managed to delay a severe hunger crisis last year by launching a massive emergency aid program.
But the conditions for the population are increasingly deteriorating.
Growing poverty means that more and more Afghans are dependent on aid.
Meanwhile, global food prices are rising because of the war in Ukraine -- and promised international funding is only partially arriving, according to a May progress report.
As a result, the most vulnerable become victims;
including children, but also mothers trying to support themselves and their families.
Naiza, who like many Afghan women only wants to use her first name, told an AP reporter that four of her children died of malnutrition, two daughters and two sons under the age of two.
"All four died because of financial problems and poverty," says the 30-year-old.
When her children got worse and became ill, she didn't have the money to have them treated.
AP spoke to Naiza at Charakar hospital in northern Parwan province, where she and her seven-month-old daughter were being treated for malnutrition.
Her husband is a day laborer, Naiza said, but also a drug addict;
he rarely brings money home.
Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, expects that 1.1 million Afghan children will suffer from severe, acute malnutrition this year, nearly double the number in 2018. Severe, acute malnutrition is the deadliest form of malnutrition.
The children lacked food and thus nutrients so much that their immune systems no longer worked, according to Unicef.
This would make them susceptible to various pathogens and ultimately so weak that their bodies could no longer absorb nutrients.
The number of children under five hospitalized for severe, acute malnutrition has steadily increased, from 16,000 in March 2020 to 18,000 in March 2021 and 28,000 in March 2022, wrote Mohamed Ag Ayoya, UNICEF representative for Afghanistan, in a tweet last week.
Afghanistan's population has already suffered from famine in recent years.
The war-torn country was hit hard by one of the most extreme droughts in decades.
But the Taliban's takeover of power last August plunged the country into an acute crisis.
Many aid organizations left Afghanistan and international sanctions made billions in funding inaccessible;
the economy collapsed.
As a result, millions of Afghans have also slipped into poverty and are now finding it difficult to feed their families.
According to the UN, around half of the 38 million Afghans lived below the poverty line at the end of last year.
That number could rise to as much as 97 percent of the population by the middle of this year.
"Because of poverty, mothers are under-nourished during pregnancy, and they don't have enough to eat after the birth either," says Mohammad Sharif, a doctor at Charakar Hospital.
1,100 malnourished children have been admitted to Mirwais Hospital in southern Kandahar province in the past six months;
30 of them died, reports Dr.
Mohammad Sediq, head of the children's ward.
One mother, Kobra, says she is unable to breastfeed her six-month-old.
“He keeps losing weight and cries all the time.
I know it's because of hunger, but there's nothing I can do."
At her home in a poor area of Kandahar city, Jamila told AP her eight-month-old son died last month after being diagnosed with severe malnutrition.
If no help comes, she fears for the lives of her other four children.
“The government didn't help us at all.
Nobody asks us if we are hungry or if we have anything to eat.«
After the Taliban took power, UN agencies launched an accelerated emergency aid program, and 38 percent of the population are now receiving food aid.
The number of people suffering from acute food insecurity fell slightly from 22.8 million last year to 19.7 in May this year, according to a report by IPC, an organization that analyzes food safety data.
But the agency warns that this small reduction should not be seen as a positive trend.
It is small in relation to the extent of the aid measures.
In addition, according to the report, conditions continued to deteriorate.
Efforts to mitigate the crisis threatened to fail.
The report cited the country's struggling economy, higher food and fuel prices and supply difficulties due to the dislocations unleashed by Russia's aggressive war in Ukraine, and "unprecedented inflation" in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, the underfunding of the relief efforts further threatens their success.
The proportion of the population receiving food aid could drop to just 8 percent in the next few months because only $601 million of the $4.4 billion needed has come in from the world community.
Only a little more than two billion have been pledged so far.
"Every year the factors linked to malnutrition increase," says Melanie Galvin, head of UNICEF's nutrition program in Afghanistan.
The lack of access to clean water and health care hits malnourished children hard.
Among other things, they die of diseases such as measles.
The good news is that the aid organizations now have access to all regions of the country.
Unicef has set up around 1,000 treatment stations in remote locations where parents can bring their malnourished children.
But emergency measures are not sustainable in the long term.
»What needs to improve are the external factors.«
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