KABUL, Afghanistan — More than seven million people in Afghanistan are being deprived of life-saving assistance due to funding shortages, the World Food Program (WFP) warned this week, as the country endures a harsh winter.
Pauline Eloff, head of WFP emergencies, described the dire situation in a video message, highlighting how heavy snow isolates many Afghan communities for months at a time.
“To ensure that the most vulnerable families can survive, we provide them with enough food to last through the harshest months of winter,” Ms. Eloff said.
She noted that the WFP had prepositioned supplies in anticipation of roads becoming impassable due to snowfall, but emphasized that limited funding has forced difficult trade-offs.
“For every family we assist, another family goes without,” Ms. Eloff said, adding that the lack of support leaves more than seven million people without the resources they need to endure the winter.
The crisis is part of a broader humanitarian emergency in Afghanistan. The United Nations projects that nearly 23 million Afghans will require humanitarian aid in 2025, with more than 12 million of them being children.
Ms. Eloff warned that without food aid, families are left to make impossible choices, including whether to feed their children.
Afghanistan’s economy has been in freefall since the Taliban seized power in 2021, exacerbating widespread poverty and food insecurity. International sanctions and a halt in development funding have compounded the challenges for aid agencies trying to meet the country’s growing needs.
The WFP has repeatedly called for increased international support to address the crisis, but the funding gap remains critical, jeopardizing millions of lives as winter takes hold.
