The UN agency urgently needs $220 million a month in 2022 as it ramps up operations to provide food and cash assistance to more than 23 million Afghans facing severe hunger.

WFP has assisted 15 million people across all 34 provinces in the country so far this year, reaching some seven million in November alone, up from four million in September.

“Afghanistan is facing an avalanche of hunger and destitution the likes of which I have never seen in my twenty plus years with the World Food Programme,” said Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the agency’s Country Director there.

#Afghanistan: 15 million Afghans receive WFP food assistance so far in 2021.

WFP is ramping up humanitarian operations to reach more than 23 million people facing severe hunger in 2022 as the economy disintegrates.

????️Full release: https://t.co/6OwwK5szjO

— World Food Programme (@WFP) December 14, 2021

Desperate measures

WFP’s latest phone survey found an estimated 98 percent of Afghans are not consuming enough food, a worrisome 17 percent increase since August.

Families are barely coping, the agency said, and are resorting to desperate measures with the onset of winter, with eight in 10 eating less, and seven in 10 borrowing food just to get by. (ILKHA)