UN wants $5 bn aid for Afghanistan in 2022

GENEVA: The United Nations said Tuesday it needed $5 billion in aid for Afghanistan in 2022 to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and offer the ravaged country a future after 40 years of suffering.

In its biggest-ever single-country appeal, the UN said $4.4 billion (3.9 billion euros) was needed within Afghanistan, while a further $623 million was required to support the millions of Afghans sheltering beyond its borders.

The UN said 22 million people inside Afghanistan and a further 5.7 million displaced Afghans in five neighbouring countries needed vital relief this year. "A full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms. My message is urgent: don´t shut the door on the people of Afghanistan," said UN aid chief Martin Griffiths. "Help us scale up and stave off wide-spread hunger, disease, malnutrition and ultimately death."

Since the Taliban hardline Islamist movement seized control in mid-August as the United States ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the country has plunged into financial chaos, with inflation and unemployment surging.

Washington has frozen billions of dollars of the country´s assets, while aid supplies have been heavily disrupted. Afghanistan also suffered its worst drought in decades in 2021. Without the aid package, "there won´t be a future", Griffiths told reporters in Geneva. The Taliban authorities said the aid appeal for suffering Afghans was "very needed". "But at the same time I would like to say the need is for all this assistance approved in the past to be delivered during this harsh winter," senior Taliban leader Suhail Shaheen, the group´s designated UN representative, told AFP.

He said the inflow of funds would also help in the functioning of the now dilapidated banking system, adding that any cash coming into the country will help rein in the inflation. "The banks are not working properly, so there is also a need to control the inflation and that can be controlled when dollars ... hard currency come to Afghanistan," Shaheen said. The International Committee of the Red Cross said injecting cash into the economy was critical to get the wheels of the economy turning again and avoid a further slide into deeper pain and poverty.

Griffiths said the appeal, if funded, would help aid agencies ramp up the delivery of food and agriculture support, health services, malnutrition treatment, emergency shelters, access to water and sanitation, protection and education. An estimated 4.7 million people will suffer from acute malnutrition in 2022, including 1.1 million children with severe acute malnutrition.