Text: USAID's Natsios On Humanitarian Efforts in Afghanistan
(He paints bleak picture of Afghan conditions) (2910)
The Afghan people face widespread starvation, particularly in the
northern areas, unless humanitarian assistance arrives soon and
unimpeded, says Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID).
"The conditions in many areas of Afghanistan are well beyond the
'pre-famine' stage," Natsios told the House Committee on International
Relations November 1. "As best we can judge, the situation will only
get worse with the coming winter." He said that 1.5 million Afghans
risk starvation, and between five and seven million face critical food
shortages.
The USAID administrator pointed out that famine conditions existed
even prior to the September 11 terrorist acts because of three years
of drought. "They enter this crisis in an extraordinary weakened
state," he said.
Natsios outlined the Bush administration's five-pronged approach for
addressing the humanitarian crisis:
-- Reducing death rates by getting as much food, blankets, shelter
material, and health kits into the country as soon as possible.
-- Minimizing population movements driven by famine by moving as much
food as possible into villages and rural areas.
-- Lowering and stabilizing food prices and discouraging food hoarding
by selling significant amounts of food to local merchants.
-- Ensuring aid reaches the intended beneficiaries and discouraging
movement into refugee camps by opening as many pipelines as possible
to move the food into remote villages and towns and by providing
cooked rather than uncooked or dry rations.
-- Providing developmental relief in the form of seed distribution and
irrigation system repairs that will assistance the people in
rebuilding damaged infrastructure.
"Despite the events of September 11, and the fact that we have no
diplomatic relations with the Taliban, and despite their refusal to
hand over bin Laden and dismantle al Qaeda, our humanitarian
assistance policies will not change," Natsios said. "Food aid
distribution will be based on need. The President has made this very
clear."
Following is the text of Natsios prepared remarks:
(begin text)
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Before a Hearing of the Committee on International Relations
U.S. House of Representatives
Afghanistan's Humanitarian Crisis
November 1, 2001
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me
here for this extremely important and timely hearing on the
humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.
Introduction
Afghanistan today is a country in crisis, a crisis that predates the
events of September l1th by many years. Three years of drought, 22
years of conflict, and five years of brutal Taliban misrule, have
brought untold suffering to millions of people.
The long drought has caused the near-total failure of rain-fed crops
in 18 of 29 provinces. Only ten to twelve percent of the country is
arable, and much of that land cannot be used due to mines and the
fighting that has raged about the country since the Soviet invasion of
1979. Thirty percent of Afghanistan's irrigation infrastructure has
been damaged or fallen into disrepair, rendering about a half of the
irrigated lands unusable.
In 1979, Afghanistan was able to feed itself. Currently, there is a
food deficit of nearly two million metric tons (MT) of food. The Food
and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that the country will
only produce 10,000 of the 240,000 MT of seed that it will need for
next year's planting. We know the reason: most of the seed has already
been eaten by farmers who fear they may not survive until the next
crop.
Approximately 12 million people, more than half of the country's
inhabitants, have been affected by the drought. About 1.5 million
people are internally displaced as a result of the fighting and the
drought, 80 percent of which were displaced prior to September 11.
Many, many thousands more are unable to move, due to illness, hunger,
injury, or disability.
The World Food Program (WFP), which distributes most of the food to
Afghanistan through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), estimates
that food stocks in the country are critically short and they are
aggressively seeking to move food into the country. NGOs and the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) have been able to
maintain their programs in many parts of the country through the
efforts of thousands of dedicated local Afghan staff, many of whom
have worked for these organizations for decades.
Still, we believe that 1.5 million Afghans risk starvation by winter's
end and that between five and seven million Afghans face critical food
shortages and are partially or fully dependent on outside assistance
for survival.
Actions prior to September 11
One of the first actions I took as the Administrator of USAID was to
order an assessment conducted by a team from our Office of Foreign
Disaster Assistance, working with the State Department's Bureau of
Population, Refugees and Migration. The team's conclusion was
inescapable: Afghanistan was "on the verge of widespread and
precipitous famine."
Based on this and other information, and with the support of Secretary
Powell, I ordered a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to the
region. They arrived in June and have been operating in the region
ever since. Since then, we have focused on Afghanistan's humanitarian
needs as never before. Through closer cooperation with the United
Nations (UN) specialized agencies and the NGOs with whom we work, we
have been able to target our efforts more precisely toward those who
need it most.
The United States, of course, has been monitoring and helping the
people in Afghanistan for many years. In the fiscal year that just
ended and in the few days since, the U.S. Government donated $184
million in humanitarian assistance for the Afghan people. This
includes a variety of programs run by the Department of Agriculture,
the Department of State and USAID.
Our country has long been the largest donor to the World Food
Program's Afghan humanitarian assistance program. Approximately, 85
percent of the WFP food aid in the pipeline now -- 45,000 MT stored in
Pakistan and another 165,000 MT on the way comes directly from the
United States.
The President has now added another $320 million of new money to this
humanitarian effort. ,
Humanitarian Situation inside Afghanistan
According to our DART, the conditions in many areas of Afghanistan are
well beyond the "pre-famine" stage. As best we can judge, the
situation will only get worse with the coming winter. Nearly
three-quarters of the at-risk population live in the northern half of
Afghanistan.
While most people comprehend famine as a dramatic increase in death
rates due to starvation and hunger-related illnesses, there are a
number of famine indicators that relief experts look for when reliable
information on death rates or malnutrition levels is not readily
available. These indicators include the following:
-- Seed shortages due to increased cost of seed and/or consumption of
seed stocks;
-- Widespread sale of family assets, including land, homes,
domesticated animals, and family possessions, to raise money to buy
food;
-- Rising prices of food staples and hoarding of grain stocks by
dealers;
-- Consumption of wild foods, domesticated animals, and inedible
materials;
-- Increased rates of wasting due to malnutrition and other
nutritional disorders;
-- Declining birth rates;
-- Mass migration in search of food and employment; and
-- Increased deaths from starvation and related diseases.
In Afghanistan, NGOs, UN agencies, and the media are reporting
evidence of nearly every one of these indicators. The Afghan people
are tough, seasoned by many years of war and conflict. But many have
exhausted their ability to cope. Their resources are exhausted, and
their animals are dead, sold or eaten. They enter this crisis in an
extraordinarily weakened state. Apart from the many sick, weak and
disabled people, the most vulnerable population lives in remote
regions, often at very high altitude, cut off from most efforts to
provide food or seed.
Based on WFP's vulnerability assessment map (VAM), the nutritional
crisis appears to be most severe in the northern half of the country
where the drought has hit hardest three years of drought versus one
year in other areas of the country-and where most of the internally
displaced population is located. We are now seeing whole communities
on the move in the north, and many villages abandoned altogether.
Although precise statistics are hard to come by, many families have
resorted to desperate measures, selling their draft animals, mixing
their food with inedible substances, selling off their last
possessions, selling their children, or marrying off their daughters
to strangers at an abnormally young age.
While we have not been able to collect data on food prices fully,
there is some anecdotal evidence that prices have risen rapidly in
rural areas, as much as 200 percent higher than prices in urban
markets, even as family income has plummeted. Most alarmingly, there
is evidence of abnormally high death rates in some parts of the north.
Humanitarian Response Strategy
President Bush's strategy to deal with this vast and complicated
humanitarian crisis is designed to accomplish five critical
objectives:
-- reduce death rates;
-- minimize population movements;
-- lower and then stabilize food prices so that food in markets is
more accessible and increase family income to afford market food;
-- ensure that aid reaches those it is intended for; and
-- begin developmental relief programs, in which we can move beyond
emergency relief, where possible, to begin long-overdue reconstruction
projects.
Reduce Death Rates
Our primary goal, of course, is to prevent as many people from dying
as possible. Winter is fast approaching, so time is clearly of the
essence. We must get as much food as possible into the country as soon
as possible, particularly in the northern half of the country. This
means doubling the amount of tonnage going in, at the very least, from
approximately 25,000 MT per month to 52,000 MT. We are opening all
possible pipelines to move food, seed, and other emergency commodities
and health kits into the country to increase the volume of aid. Health
care, nutritional surveillance, and water and sanitation programs will
help us to stop epidemics of communicable disease which can wipe out
whole populations whose immune systems have been weakened by hunger
and malnutrition. Blankets and shelter material are vital to prevent
hypothermia in the highlands where temperatures drop to minus 40
degrees Fahrenheit in the winter.
Minimize Famine-driven Population Movements
There are three common causes of widespread population movements:
economic collapse which causes people to move in search of jobs and
economic opportunities; famine which causes people to move in search
of food; and insecurity which causes people to move in search of
safety. In famines, when people have sold all their assets for food
and have run out of options, many leave their villages to find food or
work. From the experience of other famines, we know that as many as 50
percent will die along the way or in famine-induced refugee or
internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. So we must do everything we
can to encourage people who are likely to move because of food
insecurity to stay in their villages by moving as much food as
possible into the villages and rural areas. The million or more
refugees and IDPs that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has
predicted has not materialized thus far. One of our objectives is to
see that it never does.
Lower and Stabilize Food Prices
We also need to do what we can to drive down the cost of food, so that
ordinary Afghan citizens can buy what they and their families need.
People die of hunger in famines because of the skyrocketing price of
food and sometimes a collapse of family income and the depletion of
family assets. Food is nearly always available in famines, families
simply cannot afford to buy it. The best way to counter this is to
address both the supply and demand sides of the equation. On the
supply side, we can sell significant amounts of food to local
merchants in order to bring down prices and discourage hoarding. These
merchants have their own means of protecting their goods even in the
midst of general insecurity, and the incentive of profits to be made
ensures that the food will reach the markets. Experience from other
famine situations has shown this to be a particularly effective
strategy, especially in smaller markets where even limited amounts can
have a significant effect on prices. On the demand side, we can
undertake cash for work and other programs to raise family incomes so
that people can purchase the food that is available on the markets.
Ensure Aid Reaches the Intended Beneficiaries
It will be necessary to do our utmost to keep U.S. Government
humanitarian assistance out of the hands of the Taliban or other armed
groups. Part of our strategy to do so is linked to our second goal,
limiting population movements. By moving as much food as possible to
remote villages and towns where most Afghans live, we can help
discourage people from concentrating in refugee or IDP camps, where
the risk of manipulation by the Taliban and their supporters is
comparatively high.
Where the security of the food is an issue in IDP camps, we should
avoid distributing dry rations. Wet feeding programs in which prepared
food is distributed directly to beneficiaries, rather than uncooked or
dry rations, should be the norm wherever possible, even for adults.
Cooked food spoils quickly, is heavier to move and harder to store,
making it more difficult to steal and more likely that the intended
beneficiaries will receive their rations. An expatriate presence is
essential to running a cooked food program in IDP camps, a presence
which is not possible under current circumstances.
Right now the collapsing discipline of the Taliban as an organization
makes the return of expatriate relief workers problematic, many of
whom left the country due to Taliban harassment of relief agencies
last spring and summer.
By opening as many food pipelines into the country as possible, not
only will we be able to move more food quickly to where it is needed,
we will also minimize the distance any given aid convoy must travel to
reach its destination, thereby reducing the opportunity for diversion.
We will also make it our policy that only limited amounts of food will
be warehoused in areas the Taliban controls so as not to create
attractive targets for looting. Wherever possible, warehouses will be
by-passed and food will be delivered directly to beneficiaries. In
October, the Taliban took over two WFP warehouses, one of which still
remains under Taliban control. In addition, numerous security
incidents are being reported to us by humanitarian agencies of
harassment and looting by Taliban forces, although many will not speak
out publicly against these abuses for fear of putting their local
staff on the ground in jeopardy.
Finally, we will also implement a humanitarian public information
campaign so the Afghan people know aid is on the way. This will have
the dual effect of helping to discourage further population movements,
and will provide a check against diversion or manipulation of aid
since people will know what they are supposed to receive through this
information effort.
Developmental Relief/Spot Reconstruction
The constant conflict that has plagued Afghanistan has kept people
from rebuilding damaged infrastructure. We intend to structure our
relief programs so that they can begin this long-overdue process of
small-scale reconstruction at the community level where security
conditions are relatively stable. We call this spot reconstruction.
Our food-for-work programs, for example, will focus on practical
sectors. Distribution of seed for the winter wheat crop or even
small-scale repairs of irrigation systems and wells can make a
profound difference in the country's recovery from this crisis. If
enough crops can be planted and livestock rebuilt, next year will not
have to resemble this one.
Commitment to the People of Afghanistan
The President and the Secretary have made very clear that the Afghan
people are not our enemies. The President said on October 4 when he
announced his new $320 million initiative for the Afghan people: "We
are a compassionate nation .... We will work with the U.N. agencies,
such as the World Food Program, and work with private volunteer
organizations to make sure this assistance gets to the people. We will
make sure that not only the folks in Afghanistan who need help get
help, but we will help those who have fled to neighboring countries to
get help as well."
With the new funds the President has announced, we are redoubling our
efforts to get relief to those who need it most. Despite the events of
September 11, and the fact that we have no diplomatic relations with
the Taliban, and despite their refusal to hand over bin Laden and
dismantle al Qaeda, our humanitarian assistance policies will not
change. Food aid distribution will be based on need. The President has
made this very clear.
Accomplishing our humanitarian objectives under the current
circumstances is a huge task, but I am confident that, if we follow
the President's strategy, we can save many, many lives and help
Afghanistan begin to rebuild itself. Let me assure you that we at the
Agency for International Development are fully committed to doing
everything we can to work with you in Congress, the other Executive
Branch agencies, and the international community to accomplish these
objectives.
(end text)
