12 October 2001

USAID Head Stresses Urgency of Aid Delivery to Afghanistan

Washington -- The international aid effort to prevent famine in Afghanistan has placed a "huge focus" on moving food stores into areas that could soon become inaccessible to delivery trucks as winter weather sets in, according to Andrew Natsios, the senior U.S. official in charge of the humanitarian relief effort. In a matter of weeks, winter snow may begin in the Hindu Kush mountains with elevations greater than 7,000 meters in the landlocked Central Asian nation.

"People may not survive the winter, because many people are nomads in those areas, or they grow barley way up in the mountains in the high plateaus, and the crops in that area all failed," Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said at a Washington press briefing October 11. "Those people are in very bad shape right now. They don't have food stocks."

These mountainous areas are among those targeted for airdrops of food supplies. Natsios said 145,000 humanitarian meals ready-to-eat (MREs) had been airdropped into the country at the time of the briefing. He said relief agencies had recommended where the U.S. military should deliver the packets based on two criteria -- extreme inaccessibility and acute malnutrition.

"It will be a life-saver for a relatively small population of people, maybe in the hundreds of thousands, in these remote areas," according to the humanitarian official.

The food airdrops received considerable media attention when they began at about the same time as U.S. military strikes on strongholds of the ruling Taliban militia. But Natsios said that component of the humanitarian campaign comprises only one-quarter to one-half percent of the total effort to move food aid into Afghanistan, torn by decades of war and several years of drought. The international community aims to transport almost 400,000 tons of food aid into Afghanistan over the next year.

Natsios said the strategy is to move the vast majority of those relief supplies over land from warehouses in countries that border Afghanistan -- Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Over these routes, commodities can be delivered to villages and rural areas where they are most needed. "By keeping more spigots open, more food will move in," the aid official explained.

As convoys move into Afghanistan through these various routes, problems occur. The World Food Program (WFP) reports two isolated incidents in which Taliban militia attempted to impose a duty on the movement of food into the country. In a Washington File telephone interview October 12, Geneva WFP spokesman Trevor Rowe said a commercial transporter did pay the fee in one case, and WFP reimbursed him. Generally, however, Rowe said WFP will refuse to pay such duties. The two cases occurred on different routes into the countries, so at this point, Rowe said WFP does not regard this impediment to food deliveries as a "generalized phenomenon."

Asked about the degree to which the incidents have impeded the overall WFP effort to move food into Afghanistan, Rowe said, "Not on a major scale yet."

In briefing international reporters, Natsios said the military operation against Taliban targets and terrorist camps has not impeded the humanitarian campaign. "The great bulk of Afghans are not affected by the military operation. The great bulk of Afghans live in rural areas. The rural areas are relatively unaffected by what is happening," he said. The routes that trucks use to transport food deliveries into the country have not been bombed and remain open, he said.

Natsios said the potential for famine in Afghanistan was serious months before the September 11 attacks focused new attention on the country and created a stand-off between the United States and the Taliban over the militia's refusal to hand over suspected terrorist Usama bin Laden. When he stepped into the job as USAID administrator last May, Natsios said he identified humanitarian disasters in Afghanistan, Congo and Sudan as major emergencies. He offered assurances October 12 that the laser-like attention on Afghanistan does not dilute ongoing concern for problems in Africa.

"There will be no reduction of aid to any other areas of the world, and the reason for that very simply is that the president added $320 million to our budget to run this program from the $40,000 million supplemental appropriation that was approved by Congress. This is not taken from any existing accounts," Natsios said.

The USAID administrator added that he'd met with 10 African ambassadors October 10 to discuss initiatives against HIV/AIDS. "We continue to be committed," he said. "There will be no cutback of any kind, not only in Africa, but in Latin America, other parts of Asia or the Middle East."