Development News from Afghanistan

The Sydney Morning Herald
Paul McGeough
Chief Herald Correspondent in Kabul
November 22, 2008

THE sadness of the widow Zarghona’s Afghan story is its utter ordinariness. At the age of 30, she spends her days in a tiny, smoke-blackened shed, sitting cross-legged by a deep hole in which she bakes bread.

The smoke makes her eyes stream but Zarghona does not move. Swivelling from the hips, she leans to her left to grasp a ball of dough. Flattening and stretching it, she damps it with a splash of water before she drops forward to slap it to the side of the clay oven.

She wears a scarf, tied tight on her head. Two other women sit beneath their burkas – one black, the other blue – enjoying the warmth of the fire as they chat with the baker.

Zarghona knows exactly when the bread is cooked, hooking it from the oven with a length of wire. With the same expertise she keeps the fire just right, feeding it from a pile of kindling. When customers poke their heads into her smoke-filled space, she swivels to the right, swapping a loaf for the princely sum of four Afghanis – about 14 cents.

As a widow she has to work to survive – but it is lean pickings.

After paying rent for the shed and buying wood and ingredients, her little bakery clears about 1000 Afghanis, $34, a month. On a good day she sells 30 to 40 loaves.

Zarghona raises a smile but, given her circumstances, it seems almost rude to ask if her life in the new Afghanistan has improved. “Nothing has changed for me since the fall of the Taliban,” she says. “Except that my husband died of an illness two years ago.

“My children are still hungry and now that the nights are cold, I have to borrow quilts from neighbours for my girls.”

But at least in the new Afghanistan her girls can go to school to prepare them for a better life?

“No. They are aged eight and three. The eight-year-old must stay home to look after the three-year-old while I bake bread.”

By Martin Vennard
BBC News
Friday, 7 November 2008

The government in Afghanistan has banned begging on the country’s streets and called on the authorities to send beggars to care homes and orphanages.

Officials say beggars are vulnerable to crime and exploitation.

Correspondents say Afghans are sceptical about whether the government can really carry out the ban as there are so many beggars and much poverty.

Beggars are a common sight on the streets of the capital, Kabul, and other Afghan towns and cities.

Most of the beggars are women, children, the disabled or elderly and their numbers increase in the winter as food becomes scarcer and employment opportunities dry up.

Child beggars are considered particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation by drug smugglers.

The government says some beggars engage in violent and anti-social behaviour, which disgraces Afghans.

And it says not all those who beg have no other means of survival, while some make a good living from begging.

It has asked the Interior Ministry to arrest beggars and send them to orphanages or care homes run by the Red Crescent Society.

The United Nations says the true number of beggars is not known, but that Afghanistan is ranked as the fifth least developed country in the world.

Aid agencies say almost half the population live on less than the equivalent of $2 a day, while the World Food Programme is trying to feed about eight million Afghans.

KABUL, 5 November 2008 (IRIN) – A resolution by the ministers’ council – chaired by Afghan President Hamid Karzai – has outlawed street begging and instructed the Interior Ministry to arrest beggars and send them to orphanages and care homes run by the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS).

“No person – man or woman – should be begging, and children and other persons must not be used for this purpose,” reads a statement issued by the president’s office on 3 November.

“To respect human dignity, ensure social order and in light of Islamic and domestic laws, some measures have been adopted to eradicate begging… which disgraces the Afghan people,” the statement said.

The top-level initiative tasks the interior and social affairs ministries with drawing up and implementing a comprehensive plan to end street begging.

The exact number of street beggars is unclear but the phenomenon is common in urban areas.

Most of the beggars on Kabul streets are children, women, disabled or the elderly. Officials say they are prone to crime and exploitation, and sometimes engage in violent and anti-social behaviour.

Minors who beg are considered particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and drugs smuggling, experts say.

Fake beggars

“Not all those who beg on the streets are actually beggars,” Golam Gaws Bashiry, deputy labour and social affairs minister, told IRIN.

“We will first identify true beggars – those who have no other means of survival – and will send them to ‘Marastoons’ [care houses run by ARCS],” he said.

Bashiry said begging was a lucrative activity for some who are not really beggars. “We found up to US$1,000 on some of them [beggars] when we tried to collect them from the streets last year.”

The government will set up a commission to distinguish true beggars from false ones; the process will take several months, officials said.

Afghanistan is ranked by the UN Development Programme as the fifth least developed country in the world; almost half of its estimated 26.6 million people live on less than US$2 a day, according to aid agencies.

More than 40 percent of Afghans are facing food insecurity, and the UN World Food Programme is trying to feed about eight million of the most vulnerable.

Wednesday May 7, 2008

KHOST, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Said Mohammed spends eight hours a day six days a week cementing walls with his bare hands, earning just $3 a day. He could barely be happier.^
“This is a very good job, very good,” he says, beaming and eager to explain everything about it in his garbled, rapid-fire English apparently learnt from American TV shows.
“I come here from just nearby, spend eight hours, break for prayer, home at four. On Fridays I have day off. It’s very good. I support myself, seven brothers and two sisters,” he rattles off, slapping down dollops of cement as he talks.
Mohammed, 20, is one of several hundred Afghans employed at a U.S. military base in eastern Afghanistan, doing everything from digging holes to carrying furniture, building new barracks, cleaning toilets and filling sandbags.
While content, he is also a little jealous of some of the others working nearby who earn $8-10 a day doing similar jobs. They are employed by KBR, a U.S. firm with vast reconstruction and supply contracts in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to Mohammed, to get hired by KBR you have to know the man who finds the workers for the U.S. company. If you do not know him — a local from Khost — you get stuck on $3 an hour.
“Maybe soon I’ll get a new job with the Americans,” he says, looking over at the nearby work site, where 10-15 Afghans in traditional clothes with turbans on their heads — wearing dark sunglasses supplied by the Americans — are laboring in the heat under the watchful eye of a Western KBR contractor.
While the working conditions are grim — the hours are long, they are under constant watch sometimes by armed U.S. soldiers, and they have to march everywhere in single file with a “guard” behind — Mohammed and the others are in the lucky minority.
KEEP QUIET
In Khost, unemployment is estimated by local officials to be running at somewhere between 80 and 90 percent — it’s hard to tell exactly because no one registers as jobless and many people manage to find informal work from time to time.
In the past, the lack of jobs and the frustrations that brings for young men eager to earn a wage and eventually marry, has been exploited by the Taliban to win recruits. Now, when they see men working and suspect it is for the Americans, the Taliban are quick to threaten, intimidate or kill.
“I can’t tell anyone what I do,” says Saif, a translator on the base who asked that only part of his name be used.
“Just recently, one man who worked here had his head cut off by the Taliban,” he says, estimating that in the three years he has worked for the Americans, around four dozen Afghans working on U.S. bases near the city of Khost have been killed.
The laborers though are more than happy to take the risk for the sake of a small but regular wage. Most have extended families to support and are struggling because of rising food and energy costs.
In the past six months, the price of a 50 kg (110 lb) bag of rice in the Khost market has risen from 1,100 Afghanis (around $22) to 2,000 Afghanis, locals say. Wheat has risen from 1,500 for a 100 kg bag to 3,500-4,000. Diesel prices have doubled.
“It’s hard for people to survive,” says Saif, who supports 18 members of his family on earnings of around $1,200 a month.
“The high prices and the lack of work, they are both things that force people to join the Taliban,” he argues, believing that many people ally themselves with the militants not for any political reason but for criminal gain.
Those that do not have work and do not side with the Taliban tend to blame their problems on the government, which they see as corrupt and inefficient. Perhaps as a consequence, local governors are keen for the Americans to launch more reconstruction projects — like new roads — to provide jobs.
“The expectations from the people are very high,” says Abdul Jabbar Naeemi, the governor of Maidan Wardak, a province near Kabul. “What I want are more development projects so that we can give the people some jobs. That’s what they want.”
(Editing by Alex Richardson)

By Alastair Leithead
BBC News, Afghanistan
Tuesday, 22 January 2008

The opium poppy seedlings are already sprouting in Helmand province and all the predictions point to another record-breaking crop this year.

Farmers have irrigated extra patches of land, reclaiming desert to grow the plants which produce the raw materials for heroin.

With the Taleban insurgency still raging, the British counter-narcotics team in Afghanistan is unable to make any impact on the poppy problem in the south.

The farmers are weeding the fields at the moment in Helmand. It is a family business, and they insist there is no alternative.

“I only have a small area of land and 10 people in my family,” one farmer says angrily.

“I can only grow enough wheat to last two months on this land, so the only way to feed them is growing poppies.”

It is very fertile land, but the farmers complain the cost of fuel to pump irrigation water and the lack of markets and infrastructure makes anything else untenable.

Another man had his poppy crop eradicated last year, but it will not stop him trying again.

“I lost my poppies, but those grown by the rich and the powerful aren’t touched. So why should I stop growing them?” he asks.

‘Poppy-free’

The security situation is the biggest factor, but the lack of law and order and corruption are major problems in Helmand.

There is an eradication force which spends months cutting down the crops, but the richer growers or landowners pay them bribes to stay away and so far little has been achieved.

“There’s a correlation between instability and increased production,” says David Belgrove, who heads the British counter-narcotics team in Afghanistan.

“To stop poppy production [requires] more than just law enforcement. It’s a complex thing of establishing the rule of law, building alternative livelihoods, building access to markets, education – and all of these things are very difficult to deliver in an unstable environment.”

But 13 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces are categorised by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime as “poppy free” and they are hoping the lure of development money rewards will have helped even more governors achieve that status for their provinces this year.

One of these is Balkh up in the north where the Uzbek border meets Afghanistan.

Its capital, Mazar-e-Sharif is a bustling and largely secure city.

Much of this is down to Governor Atta, who has led a campaign against poppies and owes his success to good strong governance and maintaining law and order.

“Every achievement depends on good leadership and strong management,” he says.

“We had a clear plan, we were serious and had a team that was not corrupt.”

He has even produced a glossy brochure which he hands to visitors explaining his tactics for success, but he complains he has seen none of the development incentives promised.

That smuggling still goes on is not in doubt. It is a multi-million-dollar business and drugs come through Balkh north to Central Asia or west to Iran.

After meeting and drinking tea with a number of contacts in different homes outside Mazar, a bearded, cheerful drug dealer took us to a place where they displayed plastic bags of liquid opium.

He explained how the traffickers would come round to all the villages, buying what they had before taking it out of the country.

“Ordinary people like you and I can’t take drugs out of the country,” he explained.

“Only the foreigners and the big men with contacts can do it. They are stopped at police checkpoints, but they call the police chief, or a minister or the governor and they are allowed to pass.”

Forests of marijuana

The governor laughs off these suggestions as ridiculous: “It’s just propaganda against me. I have done a great deal to prevent smuggling, there is evidence.”

There is a lot of talk of corruption at the higher levels, but the dealers do say they will not grow poppies as they fear retribution.

And although they have lost a profitable crop, for now another alternative is bridging the gap.

In a mud compound a short walk away another man goes through the process of stripping the buds off giant cannabis stalks.

In the autumn vast forests of marijuana plants scatter the landscape.

It is something that has always been done here, but the price has gone up by a factor of four in just a year.

But unless help can be given to provide a viable and legal alternative, the opium poppies will be back as people struggle with poverty.

By JASON STRAZIUSO
Associated Press
Monday, January 14, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan — Gul Hussein was standing under a pale street lamp in a poor section of east Kabul when the entire neighborhood suddenly went black.

“As you can see, it is dark everywhere,” the 62-year-old man said, adding that his family would light a costly kerosene lamp for dinner that evening. “Some of our neighbors are using candles, but candles are expensive, too.”

More than five years after the fall of the Taliban — and despite hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid — dinner by candlelight remains common in the Afghan capital of Kabul. Nationwide, only 6 percent of Afghans have electricity, the Asian Development Bank says.

The electricity shortage underscores the slow progress in rebuilding the war-torn country. It also feeds other problems. Old factories sit idle, and new ones are not built. Produce withers without refrigeration. Dark, cold homes foster resentment against the government.

In Kabul, power dwindles after the region’s hydroelectric dams dry up by midsummer. This past fall, residents averaged only three hours of municipal electricity a day, typically from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., according to USAID, the American government aid agency. Some neighborhoods didn’t get any.

“That’s a scary sounding figure because it’s pretty tiny,” said Robin Phillips, the USAID director in Afghanistan. “So we’re talking about the relatively poorer people in Kabul who have no access to electricity at this time of year.”

Electricity was meager under the Taliban too, when Kabul residents had perhaps two hours of it a day in fall and winter. The supply has since increased, but not as fast as Kabul’s population — from fewer than 1 million people in the late 1990s to more than 4 million today.

Meanwhile, souring U.S. relations with Uzbekistan have delayed plans to import electricity from that country. Power is not expected to arrive in a significant way until late 2008 or mid-2009.

“Life takes power,” said Jan Agha, a 60-year-old handyman from west Kabul who recalled how the city had plentiful power during the 1980s Soviet occupation. “If you have electricity life is good, but if there’s no electricity you go around like a blind man.”

Some in Kabul do have electricity: the rich, powerful and well-connected.

Municipal workers — under direction from the Ministry of Water and Energy — funnel what power there is to politicians, warlords and foreign embassies. Special lines run from substations to their homes, circumventing the power grid. International businesses pay local switch operators bribes of $200 to $1,000 a month for near-constant power, an electrical worker said anonymously for fear of losing his job.

If high-ranking government officials visit the substations, workers race to cut off the illegal connections. Large diesel generators, which businesses and wealthy homeowners own as a backup, rumble to life.

Ismail Khan, the country’s water and energy minister, dismisses allegations of corruption as a “small problem.”

“The important thing to talk about is that in six months all of these power problems will be solved, and everyone will have electricity 24 hours a day,” he said, an optimistic prediction that relies on heavy rains next spring and quick work on the Uzbekistan line.

Colorful maps on the walls of Khan’s office show existing and future power lines. There’s a wall-mounted air conditioner — a luxury in Afghanistan.

India, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new power lines — including transmission towers installed this summer at 15,000 feet over the Hindu Kush mountains — to import electricity from Uzbekistan.

Though the line from Kabul to the Uzbek border is in place, a 25-mile section in Uzbekistan has not yet been built. And the U.S. has little leverage to speed it up, said Rakesh Sood, the Indian ambassador here.

Initially, Uzbekistan supported the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, opening an air base to U.S. planes. But the Uzbek government no longer views America as a friend, ever since U.S. leaders loudly criticized the country’s human rights record when government-backed forces massacred peaceful demonstrators in 2005.

Even when the Uzbek line is completed, Afghanistan can no longer expect the 300 megawatts originally envisioned, Sood said. That would have been more than the 190 megawatts Kabul has today and a significant boost to the 770 megawatts Afghanistan has nationwide.

“We know we’ll get significantly less. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what it will be,” Sood said. “At that time the U.S.-Uzbek relationship was very high and it has deteriorated substantially.”

President Hamid Karzai, during a radio address to the nation last fall, said he discussed with President Bush the country’s need to produce its own electricity.

But some efforts have run afoul of the continuing Taliban insurgency. A new U.S.-financed turbine for a hydroelectric dam in Helmand province is a few months away from being installed because of the “lack of permissiveness in the environment,” USAID’s Phillips said, using a euphemism for the spiraling violence there.

Also, more than $100 million is needed to upgrade Kabul’s antiquated distribution system, and it remains unclear who will pay.

“One doesn’t like to see the kinds of numbers that we’ve been talking about, but I wouldn’t call it a failure,” Phillips said. “To put a little more positive spin on it we all wish things could happen more rapidly.”

The lack of power has hamstrung U.S. efforts to boost agriculture production, too.

“The No. 1 challenge to agribusiness is electricity,” said Loren Owen Stoddard, USAID director in Kabul for alternative development and agriculture. “You can’t keep things cold and you can’t bottle them without power.”

The U.S. is purchasing fuel-powered generators that will provide 100 megawatts of power for Kabul by late next year. The power will not come cheap at 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with just 3.5 cents for electricity from Uzbekistan.

But until the Uzbek power comes in, Afghanistan has no choice.

“It’s going to be more oil-fired power and praying for rain to get the hydropower going,” said Sean O’Sullivan, regional director with the Asian Development Bank.

On a smaller scale, India has spent $2.2 million to outfit 100 villages with $450 solar cells. They dot the flat rooftops in Mullah Khatir Khel, a mud-brick village an hour’s drive north of Kabul. Each cell can power a couple of light bulbs.

“I am very happy, why should I not be happy? I am using these bulbs and lanterns provided by India,” said villager Abdul Gayoom. “Before we used to burn oil lamps, now it’s a big saving.”

All Headline News (AHN)
January 12, 2008 9:59 a.m. EST

Paul Icamina – AHN News Writer

Kabul, Afghanistan (AHN) – Afghanistan is the world’s fourth poorest or most deprived country. But surprisingly little is known about poverty and how it impacts on the population, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a recent statement. One of the reasons so little is known about the country’s population is because no census has been done in the last 30 years, ADB officials said.

The estimate is that there are 30 million people in Afghanistan. However, more than one million Afghans still seek refuge in neighboring Pakistan and Iran.

A pilot participatory project funded by the ADB Management for Development Results Cooperation Fund is currently assessing poverty in the impoverished nation, the poorest country in the entire Asia-Pacific region, according to the Afghanistan 2007 Human Development Report.

Discussions have been held with men and women in eight communities in four of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces – both rural and urban communities in Badakhshan, Herat, Nangarhar, and Uruzgan provinces

The results will help guide the government of Afghanistan and the international community in the finalization of the Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS), the road map for the country’s continued reconstruction and development, that is expected to be completed by March.

Al Jazeera / March 9, 2007
By John Cookson in Kandahar

Al Jazeera has discovered that despite billions of dollars of aid being poured into Afghanistan in the past five years Afghan children are still dying because of hunger and poverty.

John Cookson travelled to Kandahar province in the south of the country were it is too dangerous to get aid through to the starving population.

In a refugee camp in the Panj-Wayee district Al Jazeera found that the population is in desperate need of a hunger relief programme, but aid agencies are unable to travel in the area because of the risk of attacks by the Taliban or bandits looking to kidnap for ransom.

Children in the camp are dying from treatable illnesses such as diaorrhea, but have had no medical help for a year.

“There is no work, there is no food, there is no money, our kids are dying beacuse of hunger,” one man told Al Jazeera.

The 2,000 men, women and children who live in the camp originally fled a drought region but are unable to return because of the fighting between Nato forces and the Taliban.

Ironically, the winners in this story are the Taliban who are offering the men of the camp food and money for work of sorts, as fighters for the group.

“They are are easy recruits for the Taliban, to use them against the government and Nato by paying them,” Aemal Sherirzad, of the Senlis Council, an international foreign policy thinktank, said.

In Kandahar hospital, doctors and nurses do what they can for the seriously undernourished children but 25 per cent of children cannot expect to live past their fifth birthday.

“I think if both sides stop war and go to the peace, I think it would be better for the people of this country,” Dr Mohammed Siddique, a senior paediatrician, said.

The Save the Children charity says the situation in Afghanistan has arisen because many families do not understand basic good nutrition and poverty prevents the ones that do from providing healthy meals to their children and women of childbearing age.

In January, a report from New York-based Human Rights Watch said Afghanistan’s international supporter had made “little progress in providing basic needs like security, food, electricity, water and healthcare”.

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Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

PRAGUE, March 7, 2007 (RFE/RL) — An Afghan human rights organization is warning that more and more families are selling their children in the northern province of Jowzjan.

The head of the Jowzjan office of Afghanistan’s Human Rights Organization, Makhferat Samimi, told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan that poverty was forcing many parents into selling their small children, including some who were selling their daughters as brides.

“I know a woman who had sold five of her children for some food. It’s very painful to see what’s happening with our innocent children, they’re being sold because of economic problems.”

In another case, a local doctor (Mohammad Vali ) told Radio Free Afghanistan that he had met a family who had bought a 2-year-old child for 350 dollars.

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Villagers whose crops have failed after a second devastating drought are
giving their young daughters in marriage to raise money for food

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

The Observer (UK)
Sunday January 7, 2007

Azizgul is 10 years old, from the village of Houscha in western Afghanistan.
This year the wheat crop failed again following a devastating drought. Her
family was hungry. So, a little before Christmas, Azizgul’s mother ’sold’ her to
be married to a 13-year-old boy.

‘I need to sell my daughters because of the drought,’ said her mother
Sahatgul, 30. ‘We don’t have enough food and the bride price will enable us to
buy food. Three months ago my 15-year-old daughter married.

‘We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all
five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride
price is 200,000 afghanis [£2,000]. His father came to our house to arrange it.
The boy pays in instalments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to
buy food.’

Azizgul is not unique. Hers is one of a number of interviews and case studies
collected by the charity Christian Aid – all of them young girls sold by their
families to cope with the second ruinous drought to hit Afghanistan within three
years.

While the world has focused on the war against the Taliban, the suffering of
the drought-stricken villagers, almost 2.5 million of them, has largely gone
unnoticed. And where once droughts would afflict Afganistan once every couple of
decades, this drought has come hard on the heels of the last one, from which the
villagers were barely able to recover.

While prohibited by both Afghan civil and Islamic law, arranged marriages
have long been a feature of Afghan life, particularly in rural areas. What is
unusual is the age of some of the girls. And the reason: to buy food to survive.

‘Many families are doing this because of the drought,’ Sahatgul said. ‘Our
daughters are our only economic asset. We will have the marriage ceremony at
puberty. The groom, Rahim, has gone to Iran with his brothers to earn the money.
He is working on a building site. He will come back with the rest of the money
that he has earned or borrowed. He calls us every month to make sure that
Azizgul is still his.’

Najibullah, 39, is a farmer. He sold his eight-year-old daughter Somaya for
$3,000 (£1,560). She is engaged to a 22-year-old man from the village, Mohammed,
who has also gone to Iran to earn the money to pay the bride price.

‘He has already paid a deposit of $600, which we used to buy warm clothes and
food,’ said Najibullah. For her part, Somaya knows she is getting married but
does not know what that means.

The consequences of the first drought last year – which saw the wheat crop,
on which more than 80 per cent of Afghans depend, cut by half – have gone beyond
child brides. In some areas, according to the charity’s survey, farmers lost
between 80 and 100 per cent of their crops. According to Christian Aid, the
children of the affected areas have been hit in other ways: by malnutrition,
increased infant mortality, and by being sent on three-hour journeys to collect
water and firewood to survive.

Now many of those villagers worst affected are caught in a double bind.
Without their own food to survive, aid supplies have been hampered by the winter
snows, which have cut off many of the villages, while the World Food Programme’s
aid pipeline to areas like the Herat province (where Houscha lies) has been
hampered by attacks on food convoys coming from Quetta in Pakistan by the
Taliban.

‘We have advisers in Afghanistan monitoring the situation,’ said a spokesman
for Britain’s Department for International Development, ‘and we have already
given £1m in aid. Our view is that it is not quite a humanitarian crisis yet,
but it is very, very difficult. The biggest problem facing the aid effort is not
security in the country but the fact that large areas have been cut off by snow
and that food aid can only be delivered to regional centres.’

The grim picture is echoed by the UN and other international organisations
working in Afghanistan. According to the World Food Programme’s most recent food
security monitoring bulletin, food consumption in the worst affected areas has
markedly deteriorated as wheat prices, where wheat is available, have increased
by up to 37 per cent. But the picture is most graphically painted by the
suffering of the people on the ground, in particular the children.

Zarigul is 40 and also from Houscha. ‘Our children are very weak from lack of
food and we are worried that they will die. We feed them boiled water and sugar.
We have no vegetables for them, just potatoes. Last year we had vegetables. We
need help – food for ourselves and our animals.’

Children are already dying. In a graveyard on a hill overlooking the village
of Sya Kamarak in western Afghanistan, villagers gathered for the funerals of
three young children who died on the same day, from malnutrition caused by the
drought in western, northern and southern Afghanistan. There were no doctors’
reports to confirm the cause of death – the parents were too poor to take them
to the clinic, one day’s walk away.

Jan Bibi, 40, said she had been feeding her three-month-old daughter Nazia
with just boiled water and sugar because she had nothing else. ‘My baby died
because of inadequate food. I wanted to breastfeed her, but I was not producing
enough milk.’

Back in Houscha, Abdul Zahir, 58, head of the men’s council, summed up the
desperate situation confronting families. ‘There is widespread poverty. We have
to sell off our children to survive. We are not proud of it, but we have to do
it.’

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