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Extraordinary Lives of Indian Muslim Women Documented

Inter Press Service

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26 December 2021

Extraordinary Lives of Indian Muslim Women Documented

Farah Usmani, a director at the UNFPA headquarters in New York, set about changing the stereotype of Indian Muslim Women. As a result of her efforts a book, Rising Beyond the Ceiling, documents the lives of successful Indian Muslim women.

By Mehru Jaffer / Inter Press Service

It’s time the achievements of Indian Muslim women were documented to make their contribution to society visible, says international health and gender expert Dr Farah Usmani.

“The idea is to drive a new narrative about the inspiring life some of them lead today.”
Usmani was speaking to IPS in an exclusive interview in Uttar Pradesh (UP) – the largest state in India with a population of about 240 million, of which 44 million are Muslims. Half of the Muslim population in the state are women.

Usmani, a director at the UNFPA headquarters in New York, originates from UP. She wonders how such a large number of people have remained invisible in this day and age of technology.

She said that a chance remark made by a journalist in New York led her to start the Rising Beyond the Ceiling (RBTC) initiative in UP, her place of birth.

The male journalist told her that she was the first Indian Muslim woman he had spoken to in his life.

Long after her meeting with the journalist, Usmani could not stop thinking of how millions of Indian Muslims remain unknown despite their creative contributions to society.

Research, text, images and the the will to challenge

Colourful and inspiring images of countless Muslim women she knows flashed across her mind. She decided to share her troubling thoughts with other female friends and family members.

Usmani has over 25 years of experience in policy and programming leadership, focusing on women and girls and their reproductive health and rights. She reached out to like-minded women in UP, and within days a team of six professional Muslim women was formed.

The RBTC initiative is referred to as the team’s ‘COVID’ baby because it was initiated in early 2020 at the peak of the second wave of the deadly pandemic in India.

Building an alternative narrative

“Our brief was to work online and to scout and profile 100 Muslim women in UP. The purpose was to document the inspiring lives led by some Indian Muslim women,” Sabiha Ahmad, team coordinator and social activist, told IPS.

The idea of documenting the extraordinary lives of Indian Muslim women was born out of the urgent need to change the stereotypical narrative about women by women.

The team liked the idea of getting women to build an alternative narrative of each other by curating real-life stories of successful Muslim women in all their diversity.

The goal was to make these lives visible and drive a new narrative around Indian Muslim women. The result was a 173-page book. It documents the women from the state who drones and aeroplanes, weave carpets, serve in the police and army, write books and poetry, paint and bag trophies in tennis and snooker competitions.

There are profiles of politicians, trendsetters, doctors, entrepreneurs, and corporate professionals who met in Lucknow recently to celebrate the RBTC book and meet each other in person.

Paths our grannies left untrodden

Usmani used her latest visit to Lucknow to release Rising Beyond The Ceiling formally. The directory details the lives of 100 Indian Muslim women whose inspiring stories shatter the stereotypical narrative a group perceived as primitive, veiled and suffering.

Faiza Abbasi, 47, contributor and co-editor, says the RBTC directory dares to write a different story. It is a step by women to celebrate each other.

“We come forward to highlight each other’s achievements and to take the road our grannies left untrodden,” smiles Abbasi.

Abbasi is an educationist, environmentalist, and outstanding public speaker with a popular YouTube channel. She recalls how her father celebrated her birth by distributing sweetmeats to family and friends. However, an elderly aunt questioned the festivities. The aunt asked why the energy and resources were being wasted, and a fuss made over the birth of a girl?

Not used to the relatively progressive environment of today, many women still hesitate to celebrate their achievements.

“We at RBTC want to celebrate and to learn to appreciate each other,” assures Abbasi.

The RBTC promises to branch out its research analysis and documentation to other Indian states to document the successes of Muslim women.

The work of RBTC is vital at a time when the majority of Muslim women in India are the most disadvantaged. Statistical and micro studies on Muslim women show that they are economically impoverished and politically marginalised.

This piece has been sourced from Inter Press Service

Open Letter to the Secretary General, Heads of UN Agencies & International Donor Community

Inter Press Service

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26 December 2021

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Open Letter to the Secretary General, Heads of UN Agencies & International Donor Community

Former UN Women staff members Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, Roberta Clarke and Meryem Aslan, together with women leaders and advocates from civil society organisations write to alert the international community to the urgency of preventing a human catastrophe in Afghanistan.

By Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, Roberta Clarke and Meryem Aslan

We are former UN officials with decades of combined experience supporting international civil society and governments to advance the rights of women and girls.

We came together to alert the United Nations and the international community to the urgency of preventing a human catastrophe in Afghanistan. Afghan women and men must not be condemned to yet another decade of regionalism/ sectarianism/tribalism and proxy wars.

The UN needs to step up its game, offer to facilitate a platform for inclusive leadership in the country that can bring Afghans together, and work together with them to prevent reemergence of proxy wars, building a road towards international consensus for peace and security.

The international community must ensure that Afghans, especially Afghan women and girls, participate on equal terms in the making of their country, re-establishing human rights monitoring mechanisms and, as a matter of urgency, accessing and monitoring distribution of humanitarian aid in Afghanistan.

As Naheed Farid, a Parliamentarian and House Chair of the Women’s Committee in Afghanistan said: “Action needs to be taken to ensure that the de facto authorities in Kabul develop an inclusive and fully representative governance body that represents the diversity of Afghan society.”

We encourage negotiations that create space for Afghan people, including women and girls, to take their destiny into their own hands. We also endorse the call for Afghan women’s centrality in decision-making on global aid made by Margot Wallstrom and Susana Malcorra on 4 November in PassBlue.

Life for Afghans, especially Afghan women and girls, has been insecure, dangerous, and constrained for decades. Armed conflict and militarism have stalled all prospects of development and peace for Afghanistan. Women and girls have been and remain the target of violent discrimination.

The 2020 Human Development Index for Afghanistan indicates that gender inequalities in health, education and control over economic resources remains high, ranking Afghanistan 157th among 162 countries in the gender inequality index.

The seizure of state power by the Taliban, the partial collapse of state services compounded by the recent measures to limit education for girls and remove women from the workforce, the increased retreat of women into their homes portends serious deterioration of women’s rights in Afghanistan and further widening of gender inequality in the country.

While Taliban are working to transform themselves from a radical movement into a legitimate state structure and try to govern the country, ethnic, communal and regional factions are starting to vie for power.

For example, on 8 October, the Islamic State Khorasan bombing in a Shiite Mosque in Kunduz province killed close to 70 people and injured 140 worshippers from a Hazara community. This was the second attack on a Shiite Mosque in one week. Earlier, the same group attacked a military hospital in Kabul, killing 20 people and injuring 16.

Testing the limits of Taliban governance, food and water shortages plague isolated communities and urban centers alike. A thirty year-drought, widespread displacement, lack of jobs and scarce cash have spun the economy into free fall as another brutal winter sets in. No information is available on the real costs of the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognizing Afghanistan’s rapidly deteriorating conditions, UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, noted that the international community is in a “race against time” to prevent an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Conditionality imposed by the international community for releasing aid may have already deepened the scale of human suffering. In addition, delivery of aid seems to becoming an important issue. Despite the promises of Taliban to allow humanitarian agencies to operate, USAID reports that at least two-thirds of aid organizations in Afghanistan have faced severe bottlenecks in aid delivery since the fall of Kabul.

Access to aid by to those who need it most may be the first casualty of a collapsing state. Food and supplies trickling into the country have been diverted to the black market by local power brokers. Almost no information is available on household distribution of aid or the amount and quality of aid reaching the Afghan people.

This situation leaves women and girls increasingly vulnerable to abuse and violence. As in many humanitarian emergencies, civil society monitors report that food aid is appropriated to exchange for sexual favors or child “marriages,” as desperate families bargain for survival. Single mothers are not recognized as heads-of-household by local authorities and therefore are likely to face barriers in accessing humanitarian assistance.

Exhaustive global research over decades has documented that aid delivered to women by women most effectively reduces “leakage,” ensuring that assistance reaches the most vulnerable groups. Afghan women are best placed to ensure that food and other humanitarian assistance reach children, the disabled and elderly, and especially female-headed households.

However, in addition to restrictions on women’s access to education and employment, the backsliding and regression on women’s and girls’ right can most strikingly be observed in their participation in decision-making mechanisms.

The Taliban’s formation of an all-male interim administration have eliminated women’s hard-won if still limited leadership roles in the executive and judiciary at all levels of government. Women’s equal participation in political and public life is not only a prerequisite for realizing a life free of violence and discrimination, but also for increasing the quality of development and aid and ensuring equal access to the benefits of aid.

We recognize that efforts of the last twenty years resulted in limited advances for most Afghan women and girls. The bulk of resources in the country went to the military investment and much aid was siphoned off by excessive corruption. . Yet good progress was made in opening up educational opportunities for girls and livelihood options for women.

Even more lasting is the dynamic network of women’s civil society organizations, sports, scientific, media and cultural groups that were built over the past twenty years. Resilient women and girls have fought against biases, even faced down stone-throwing crowds, to build their bicycle racing teams, their robotics organizations and women’s radio stations.

They run shelters for women expelled from their homes and promote females’ participation at all levels of government. Now, a generation of women and girls that entered public life as teachers, lawyers, journalists and politicians are feeling at a loss and in danger; they are afraid of losing the future.

We cannot be silent as this progress is walked back. Women’s and girls’ futures must not become casualties of the withdrawal of US and NATO forces from Afghanistan. The safety of hundreds of women’s human rights defenders, judges, politicians, physicians, professors, journalists and artists who are still in Afghanistan must be prioritized and they must be at the table in aid and political negotiations, putting aid distribution systems in place, monitoring delivery and building inclusive governance systems.

Humanitarian aid to stabilize the population will only be effective if women civil society leaders are positioned to monitor secure and timely distribution, and the inclusion of women must be top priority of aid and governance negotiations with the Taliban. The United Nations and the international donor community are morally obligated to ensure Afghan women’s access to humanitarian assistance, and time is running out.

Signed By: Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, Roberta Clarke, Meryem Aslan, Moni Pizani Orsini, Madhu Bala Nath, Joanne Sandler, Roshmi Goswami, Socorro Reyes, Anne Stenhammer, Yamini Mishra, Lucia Salamea-Palacios, Roxanna Carillo, Susana Fried, Dina Deligiorgis, Bharati Silawal-Giri, Amarsanaa Darisuren, Sushma Kapoor, Chandni Joshi, Suneeta Dhar, Stephanie Urdang, Aster Zaoude, Achola Pala, Celia Aguilar Setien, Anne Marie Goetz, Elizabeth Cox, Nalini Burn, Ana Falu, Ilana Landsberg Lewis, Branca Moreira Alves, Memory Zonde-Kachambwa, Sangeeta Rana Thapa, Shawna Wakefield, Flora Macula, Guadalupe Espinosa, Ooyuna Oidov, Jean da Cunha

Rebecca Reichmann Tavares, Roberta Clarke and Meryem Aslan are former UN Women staff members

This piece has been sourced from Inter Press Service

The Global Assault on Human Rights

Inter Press Service

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24 December 2021

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By Ben Phillips

Human rights are under global assault. In 2021, the escalation of the worldwide siege on human rights included clampdowns on civil society organisations, attacks on minorities, the undermining of democratic institutions, and violence against journalists.

Human rights came under attack not only from coups, from Myanmar to Sudan, but also from strong men in democracies, from Brazil to the Philippines. The 6 January attack on the Capitol in the US exemplified the fragility of human rights worldwide.

2021 saw the conservative think tank Freedom House raise the alarm about what it calls one of the biggest worldwide declines in democracy “we’ve ever recorded”. But to protect human rights, it is vital to understand why they are under threat.

Crucially, it is not a coincidence that humanity has been simultaneously hit by a crushing of human rights and ever-increasing inequality; they are mutually causal. There is no winning strategy to be found in the approach followed by institutions like Freedom House which cleaves civil and political rights from economic and social rights, and has no answer to the inequality crisis.

Impact of ultra-capitalism

Organisations rooted in civil society organising have set out powerfully the interconnectedness of the human rights crisis and the inequality crisis.

Civicus’s 2021 State of Civil Society report notes how “economic inequality has become ever more marked, precarious employment is being normalized [and] big business is a key source of attacks on civic space and human rights violations.”

So too, Global Witness’s 2021 Last Line of Defence report notes that “unaccountable corporate power is the underlying force which has continued to perpetuate the killing of [land and environmental] defenders.”

As human rights scholars Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz have noted, “when the political power of the elites expands as the income and wealth distribution becomes more polarized, this compromises the entire range of human rights.” Civicus terms the assault on human rights as one of “ultra-capitalism’s impacts”.

The World Inequality Report records how “in 2021, after three decades of trade and financial globalization, global inequalities are about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.

Plutocrats find collaborators

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated even more global inequalities. The top 1 per cent took 38 per cent of all additional wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, with an acceleration since 2020.

Societies that are more unequal are more violent. As collective institutions like trade unions are weakened, ordinary people become increasingly atomized. As social cohesiveness is pulled apart by inequality, tensions rise.

It is in such contexts that far right movements thrive, and whilst such movements claim to be anti-elite, they soon find common cause with plutocrats in directing anger away from those who have taken away the most and onto those who can be targeted for the difference in how they look, speak, pray or love.

Human rights can only be protected in their fullness

Yet, as writer Michael Massing put it, “many members of the liberal establishment dismiss populism as a sort of exogenous disease to be cured by appeals to reason and facts rather than recognize it as a darkly symptomatic response to a system that has failed so spectacularly to meet the basic needs of so many.”

Human rights can only be protected in their fullness – civil, political, economic and social. As Lena Simet, Komala Ramachandra and Sarah Saadoun note in Human Rights Watch’s 2021 World Report: “A rights-based recovery means governments provide access to healthcare, [and] protect labor rights, gender equality, and everyone’s access to housing, water and sanitation.

It means investing in public services and social protection, and strengthening progressive fiscal policies to fund programs so everyone can fulfill their right to a decent standard of living. It means investing in neglected communities and avoiding harmful fiscal austerity, like cutting social protection programs.”

Only determined organising connecting the inseparable struggles for human rights and a more equal society will be powerful enough to win.

Ben Phillips is the author of How to Fight Inequality and an advisor to the UN, governments and civil society organisations.

This opinion piece has been sourced from Inter Press Service

Study Says Pandemic Could Leave Its Mark On Society For Decades To Come

Atul Kishore

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24 December 2021

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Study Says Pandemic Could Leave Its Mark On Society For Decades To Come

Women, people living in urban settings and refugees and migrants have been worst affected by the COVID-19 pandemic says a Red Cross research.

Refugee women living in crowded urban settings have experienced the worst impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent research from the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC).

The report, titled ‘Drowning just below the surface’ sheds light on who has been most impacted by the pandemic and how.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has caused increased unemployment and poverty and increased food insecurity, it has simultaneously heightened vulnerabilities to violence and impacted opportunities for children, especially their education. It has also exacerbated mental health issues.

The report says that “the exclusion of people with migrant backgrounds from government assistance and other support has meant they experienced disproportionate harms from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Summarising the findings of the report, IFRC president Francesco Rocca says that the destructive impacts of the pandemic on society’s fabric could be felt in the decades to come.

“People who were already vulnerable, due to conflict, climate-change, and poverty, have been pushed further towards the edge,” he says. “And many people who were previously able to cope have become vulnerable, needing humanitarian support for the first time in their lives.”

The report alludes to Afghanistan’s Ministry of Public Health, according to which, the restrictions accompanying the pandemic caused spikes in loneliness, depression, harmful drug use, self-harm and suicidal behaviours, indicating that some Afghans were resorting to negative or adverse coping strategies.

One assessment the report says, found that “58 to 71 per cent of households in Afghanistan observed a change of behaviour in at least one family member in the past year, including angry or aggressive behaviour, avoiding going to work, and substance abuse.”

Restore Burned-out Peatlands, ‘Save Billions Of Dollars’

SciDevNet

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22 December 2021

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Restore Burned-out Peatlands, ‘Save Billions Of Dollars’

Indonesia can save billions of dollars by restoring burned-out peatlands. The savings are in terms of environment, climate and human health.

By Sanjeet Bagcchi / SciDev.Net

Restoration of Indonesian peatlands burned out by fires between 2004 and 2015 could have led to savings worth US$8.4 billion, making it a cost-effective strategy to reduce the effects of peatland fires on the environment, climate and human health, according to a new study.

Peatlands refer to naturally accumulated soil-like deposits of partly decomposed vegetable matter. They cover 27.1 million hectares in South-East Asia, including more than 22.5 million hectares in Indonesia alone, according to the University of Leicester, in central England.

Fires in 2015 scorched 2.6 million hectares across the archipelago and produced toxic haze over Singapore and Malaysia, causing thousands to fall ill. The Indonesian government suffered economic losses worth US$16 billion as a result, according to the World Bank.

Published this month in Nature Communications, the study says peatland fires release carbon dioxide which contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia. The fires also emit substantial amounts of PM 2.5 (pollutant particles measuring 2.5 microns or smaller) and other air pollutants responsible for poor air quality and adverse effects on health.

Saving peatlands and even preventing premature deaths

When fire damages agricultural land and forest resources, the resultant haze disrupts transport, tourism and trade, leading to a slowdown in the region’s economic performance, the researchers said. The Indonesian government has committed to restoring 2.49 million hectares of degraded peatland at an estimated cost of US$3.2 billion to US$7 billion, they added.

The researchers combined land cover data and fire emissions data from the 2015 fires in Indonesia (the country’s largest recent fire event) which led to a financial loss of US$28 billion. They also evaluated the six largest fire events in the country between 2004 and 2015 which resulted in a financial loss of US$93.9 billion.

If that restoration had already been completed, the area burned in 2015 would have been reduced by six per cent and there would have been a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 18 per cent and in PM 2.5 of 24 per cent, preventing 12,000 premature deaths, the study said.

Costs and benefits analysis

“In this study we show that peatland restoration can be an effective and cost- effective way of reducing fires, and therefore has multiple benefits,” said study author Laura Kiely, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, in Riverside, US. “We hope that these findings will support current peatland restoration plans and encourage continued and more ambitious peatland restoration,” she told SciDev.Net.

Riina Jalonen, a scientist at the Bioversity International, Malaysia, told SciDev.Net that, “[Peatland] restoration is made difficult by the fact that the allocation of costs and benefits is uneven, and the realities of the landowners and land users often contrast with the needs and interests of those affected by haze, at least in the short term.”

“Peatlands can be restored by blocking drainage canals to re-wet the peat and planting trees to revegetate the landscape,” said a press release relating to the study by the University of Leeds, UK. “A moratorium on any new land conversion on peatland was brought into effect in Indonesia in 2011, and in 2016 the Peatland Restoration Agency was established to restore and re-wet 2.49 million hectares of degraded peatland.”

This piece has been sourced from SciDev.Net

Honey Money Helps Bail Out Bangladesh’s Farmers From Debt, Endure Climate Change

Bijoy Patro

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22 December 2021

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Honey Money Helps Bail Out Bangladesh’s Farmers From Debt, Endure Climate Change

Keeping honey bees to supplement income from rice and mustard farming might not be a conventional model, but the bees are proving to be a boon in these times of climate change, helping farming families with some income to sustain themselves.

Honey collection with mustard fields in full bloom and a blue sky in the horizon is now a common sight in the villages of Rajshahi. It brings money as the demand for honey burgeons. Coincidentally, it is also providing a boon for farmers affected by climate change.

Honey production needs to keep pace with its perennial demand, that continues to grow in Bangladesh and also across the country’s border with India. This combination of the stars has ensured that there is an elaborate network of merchants willing to buy the golden viscous sweetener.

It seems to have happened all of a sudden. and But NGOs workers who first introduced the idea among farmers in the late 90s are not surprised. The resilient farmers of Rajshahi have a long history indulging in cash crops. “Farmers here once practiced sericulture,” says Mobin Islam who works with a local non-government organisation (NGO) in the district. “Some years ago, they switched to growing groundnuts, until the floods destroyed the crop a few years ago.”

Floods and misery in the char islands

Lots of land in Rajshahi is char – river islands that have come up with the accumulation of silt. Growing groundnut here made sense to the farmers because the soil was sandy. Until the flood waters arrived.

Farmers have suffered heavy losses because of the flooding for three years in a row. The flooding during the past three years have damaged crops and severely affected about 250,000 families. Experts warn that such disaster might come more often with the changing climatic conditions and apiculture farming is a boon as it aids the region’s resilient farming community.

Earlier, the farmers took loans from the local moneylenders, or mahajans, and found it difficult to escape the debt trap. Many would migrate to Dhaka, Narayanganj, Gazipur and other cities in search of work. Some farmers also got help from different NGO.

Vast stretches of the land are also barren, unfit for growing any crop. A small harvest of the aman rice crop, grown after the monsoon rains is all that they get from this land. Boro, or the winter crop, is a risk few farmers are willing to undertake. Instead, they grow mustard – and even though mustard is a subsistence crop, it helps sustain the bees. Hence apiculture, or honey bee farming. (All eight districts of the Rajshahi division put together are expected to produce no more than 3 lakh tonnes of mustard this year.)

Government steps in

The government has come in to support the honey producers. Local agriculture department officials provide the farmers with mustard seeds, fertiliser, boxes with a bee hive and honey bees, safety clothing, and importantly, training.

Farmer Dulal Hossain collects about 25 kilos of honey from each of the boxes on this land every month. This got him six lakhs Bangladeshi Takas last year.

Others who farm the local bee specie, serena, promoted by the NGOs say that they have a better demand. In fact, even the demand for the serena bees is high.

Nepal Prime Minister Deuba Acknowledges “A New Variant Of COVID Has Been Detected In Nepal”

OWSA Staff

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21 December 2021

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Nepal Prime Minister Deuba Acknowledges “A New Variant Of COVID Has Been Detected In Nepal”

Addressing provincial chief ministers and government functionaries in an online interaction, Prime Minister Deuba spoke of “a new variant of COVID”.

Nepal’s prime minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, yesterday said that a new variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Nepal. Deuba said this while addressing a virtual interaction with the chief ministers of the country’s seven provinces and the concerned ministers of the federal government on Monday.

Deuba did not mention the Omicron strain (B.1.1.529) of the SARS-CoV-19 virus during his address wired from Kathmandu’s Singh Durbar, according to Radio Nepal.

Radio Nepal quoted the prime minister as saying, “It is said that a new variant of COVID has been detected in Nepal.”

The prime minister stressed that an effective vaccine campaign was his governments present priority. This would help save lives.

He said that though progress was made in the vaccination campaign against COVID-19, many doses are still lying in storage and have not reached the doorsteps of the people.

He called on government functionaries, particularly the chief district officers, people’s representatives to work together with stakeholders in order to make the campaign effective.

“I request all to actively engage in the campaign of protecting all the citizens from COVID-19 by administering them with a full dose of vaccine within mid-April, 2022,” Deuba said, according to Radio Nepal.

Deuba appealed to security forces, health workers, political parties and others to ensure the full dose of vaccine.

Experts worried

On 6 December, a government spokesperson had confirmed the presence of Omicron variant of the coronavirus in two people, including a foreigner, in the country. But soon, the government went silent on the subject.

Nepal’s health experts are worried. “The scene will be clear in the next two weeks, which is crucial for us,” today’s edition of The Kathmandu Post quoted infectious disease expert Prabhat Adhikari as saying.

The previous peak in neighbouring India due to the Delta variant in March 2021 took around a month to spread in the landlocked country.

Adhikari told the newspaper that “It will not take one month for the new variant to spread here is there is an outbreak in India, as the doubling time of the virus is only two to three days. Case doubling time for the Delta variant of the virus was six days.”

The prime minister’s speaking about the “new variant of COVID” being detected in the Himalayan country could well put the spanner in the work of health experts like Adhikari.

Red Cross, WFP Seek International Funds For Food As Afghanistan Faces A Grim Winter

OWSA Staff

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3 December 2021

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Red Cross, WFP Seek International Funds For Food As Afghanistan Faces A Grim Winter

Kabul, 4 December

Afghans are facing the worst drought and hunger crisis in living memory. Life-saving relief and supplies must reach people ahead of a harsh winter. The Red Cross and the World Food Programme have both geared up to serve the Afghan people and have sought aid from the world community.

Afghanistan is in the grip of one of the worst droughts and food shortage crises in decades, threatening an unrivaled humanitarian catastrophe, says the says the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC).

The Red Cross warning comes on the heels of an earlier similar warning from the World Food Programme that pointed to a desperate food situation in the country. The WFP press statement spoke of Afghans selling their homes to be able to buy food. The looming bitter winter is certain to make life more difficult for millions of Afghans, according to IFRC.

Emergency food relief and winter survival kits are being urgently delivered by the Red Cross to people in areas worst affected by severe food shortages.

Around 22.8 million people – 55 per cent of Afghanistan’s population – are experiencing high levels of acute food shortages. Severe drought has hit more than 80 percent of the country, crippling food production and forcing people from their land.

Nearly 700,000 people have been internally displaced this year, joining some 3.5 million people already forced from their homes throughout the country, who all face a harsh winter, when temperatures can drop as low as -20C in some areas of Afghanistan.

“Afghans have shown remarkable resilience in the face of this latest drought, growing hunger and decades of conflict,” says Mawlawi Mutiul Haq Khales, Afghan Red Crescent Acting President. “Millions of people are struggling to survive due to whole-scale crop losses, acute food shortages, and a lack of cash to buy basic necessities.”

“Afghan Red Crescent teams have not stopped helping people with relief and healthcare, but the vast majority of families remain unassisted, lacking adequate food provisions, money for the very basic needs and survival kits to get through the harsh winter months ahead,” he said.

IFRC is providing 3,000 tonnes of food relief for 210,000 people and winter survival kits are being urgently delivered by Afghan Red Crescent in some of the hardest hit provinces for those suffering shortages and loss of income. To mitigate the misery and hardships of winter, families are being provided with winter kits, including blankets, thermal insulation and heaters but additional funding is needed to expand the humanitarian operations.

IFRC has sought 36 million Swiss francs to support Afghan Red Crescent to deliver emergency relief and recovery assistance to 560,000 people in 16 provinces worst affected by severe drought and displacement.

The IFRC appeal is in addition to the US$ 2.6 billion sought by the WFP to feed vulnerable people in Afghanistan.

An official of the IFRC said that this is the worst drought and hunger crisis faced by Afghans in living memory. Much faster international action is needed to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in the coming months.

“People are already going hungry in Afghanistan and conditions are continuing to deteriorate. I have spoken to doctors who are reporting increased cases of acute malnutrition among children. It will only get worse in the weeks ahead.”

As well as immediate relief, IFRC appeal funds will help with establishing more drought-resistant crops and revitalising livestock, while supporting critical income generation for women, the elderly and those most at risk of spiraling poverty.

The appeal by the two leading humanitarian organisations comes amid growing restlessness among people across Afghanistan over the Taliban’s incompetency in dealing with the humanitarian crisis in the country.

Research, text, images and the the will to challenge

Building an alternative narrative

Paths our grannies left untrodden

Impact of ultra-capitalism

Plutocrats find collaborators

Human rights can only be protected in their fullness

Saving peatlands and even preventing premature deaths

Costs and benefits analysis

Floods and misery in the char islands

Government steps in

Experts worried

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Climate Change

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