Letters | Afghanistan’s hunger crisis: don’t look away as starving Afghans sell their children

Name: ‘No other choice’: Afghan parents sell young daughters into marriage amid starvation and poverty
Uploaded: 2021-11-23T16:30:24.000Z
Duration: 1 min 59 s
Description: ‘No other choice’: Afghan parents sell young daughters into marriage amid starvation and poverty

Afghanistan is facing its worst hunger crisis in living memory and needs humanitarian help. More than half the population have acute malnutrition, and children are starving to death

Reading Time:2 minutes

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The stepmother of Mohammed, a four-month-old who is malnourished, holds his legs in the Indira Gandhi hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan on November 8.The number of people living in Afghanistan in near-famine conditions has risen to 8.7 million, according to the World Food Programme. Photo: AP

Letters

Published: 12:30am, 24 Nov 2021

If you were starving and you knew the sale of one of your children would prevent the rest of your children from dying, would you do it?

For a moment, let’s put aside the shocking reality that in Afghanistan you can buy a child, a practice which is increasing in response to the dire hunger situation in the provinces where my national emergency response staff work.

The situation in Afghanistan is so bad that my dedicated staff – while running food aid programmes deep into remote areas – have set up an in-office staff fund to support desperate families and stop them from selling their daughters. They know those girls, often incredibly young, will end up married to older men or sold into servitude and vulnerability. Although these practices took place before the Taliban came to power, the situation has worsened due to the hunger crisis.

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‘No other choice’: Afghan parents sell young daughters into marriage amid starvation and poverty

Afghanistan is facing its worst hunger crisis in living memory. More than half of the 40 million population are facing acute levels of malnutrition, and children are dying due to starvation.

Winter is now what everyone fears, as things will get much worse, quickly. Soon, snowfalls will prevent access to remote areas which could then be cut off for up to four months. We are very quickly running out of time to get food aid into villages that will soon become inaccessible.

My organisation, World Vision, has been on the ground for 20 years undertaking a range of humanitarian and development work, but the activities that are most critical at this moment are providing emergency nutrition via 15 mobile health clinics.

The other thing we do is provide the food that the UN’s World Food Programme gives us to distribute in Western Afghanistan. We have reached more than 120,000 people since October, but many more need to be reached.