4 August 2026
Key points
- 14 million
Afghans face acute hunger, with only one in nine receiving
WFP food assistance. - Child malnutrition has reached
record levels in 12 provinces, with children under two
hardest hit. - Funding shortages have forced WFP to
scale back lifesaving nutrition programmes
nationwide. - The agency needs $500 million before
winter to avert a worsening humanitarian
crisis.
In a new alert on Tuesday, the UN World
Food Programme (WFP) said that one in three
Afghans is now in the grip of acute food insecurity and that
it lacks the resources to contain the deepening
crisis
Today, 12 provinces have now reached critical
levels of acute child malnutrition, the highest number ever
recorded.
Conflict, widespread unemployment, soaring
food prices, shrinking humanitarian funding and disruption
to supply routes are fuelling the crisis, WFP
said.
Forced returns
The return of six million
Afghans pushed back mainly from Pakistan and Iran since
September 2023, has increased the strain on the country’s
already fragile economy.
“In the past three years,
close to six million Afghans have been forcibly expelled
from neighbouring countries,” said John Aylieff, WFP
Country Director for Afghanistan. Briefing journalists in
Geneva from Kabul, he explained that there are “simply not
enough jobs to sustain” the returnees.
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“Conflict
with Pakistan and the Middle East crisis have created trade
disruptions, which have pushed up the price of staple foods
by 20 to 30 per cent…The poor are being priced out of the
market,” he explained.
Because of crippling funding
cuts, WFP has been able to feed only one in nine of the 14
million people now acutely hungry in Afghanistan.
And
as funding shortfalls deepen, lifesaving nutrition programs
are being scaled back, just as needs are
peaking.
Most vulnerable infants
Child wasting
– the deadliest form of malnutrition – has reached critical
levels in one-third of the country’s provinces. “The
number of children being rushed to health centres is soaring
and we’re seeing this visibly. Eighty per cent of the worst
cases are children under two years of age and NGOs report
that too many of them are arriving too late to be saved,”
warned Mr. Aylieff.
Shrinking humanitarian funding
means that “millions of acutely malnourished Afghan
children are being turned away without assistance at the
very moment when their lives are at risk,” leading to
“deaths, which of course are fully preventable”, he
added.
During a recent visit to the province of
Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, WFP staff met Farida, a
mother of three whose story reflects the plight of many of
the country’s poorest families. Her husband, an elderly
street vendor, earns less than a dollar a day, leaving the
family with no chance of affording nutritious food,
healthcare, or other basic necessities.
Mother’s
plight
Two of Farida’s children suffer from anaemia,
and her six-year-old son has been too weak to attend school
for months, because of acute malnutrition.
“When we
spoke to Farida, her baby started crying from hunger,” the
WFP Country Director for Afghanistan said. “She reached
into her bag and pulled out a child’s bottle. Normally, you
expect the child’s bottle to be full of milk. This one only
had weak tea in it. There was simply no money in the
household for milk.”
Farida told WFP that she
repeatedly has to tell her children that there is nothing
more to eat. The family is barely surviving on tea and
bread. Without the food assistance they receive through a
WFP-supported clinic, she said her children would
“undoubtedly die”.
“That’s a hard message to
hear,” said Mr. Aylieff. “But harder still when you
realize that WFP is only funded this year to feed one in
seven acutely malnourished women and children. Yes, we are
turning away six out of seven and we’re turning them away
empty-handed with absolutely nothing,” he
stressed.
WFP treats malnourished children aged under
five and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers in clinics
across the country, in partnership with UNICEF. But a sharp
decline in humanitarian funding has forced the agency to
prioritize food assistance to only a fraction of the most
vulnerable. The distribution of specialized nutritious foods
to prevent malnutrition and stunting halted completely in
May 2025.
The UN food agency warned that
Afghanistan’s nutrition crisis is spinning out of control.
WFP’s operations for emergency food assistance and
nutrition programmes are costed at about $900 million for
2026. “We have not met needs in the first six months
because we didn’t have money. And when you look at the next
six-month window, this critical window, not just because of
the current crisis, but also in the run up to winter, which
is the real flashpoint of hunger, WFP still needs $500
million to address the acute food needs in the country,”
said Mr. Aylieff.
Exhaustion, poverty and
hunger
Briefing reporters in New York, UN
humanitarian aid office (OCHA) in Afghanistan spokesperson
Olga Cherevko said she recently travelled around the country
and heard from flood victims and people suffering from
malnutrition.
“They’re exhausted from being poor,
from being hungry, from climate shocks, from mounting debt,
and from the daily struggle of providing for their
families,” she said.
Despite the end of the 20-year
conflict following the Taliban takeover, 3.7 million Afghan
children and 1.2 million pregnant and breastfeeding women
are projected to be malnourished.
Although the
humanitarian response in Afghanistan is dangerously low on
funding – just 26 per cent of the target for 2026 – Ms.
Cherevko said humanitarian assistance will not be enough to
create the conditions for long-term
security.
Humanitarians continue to highlight that
deepening hunger fuels migration, radicalisation and
ultimately instability, with consequences that extend beyond
Afghanistan’s
borders.
