Afghanistan Needs `Berlin Airlift’ to Avoid Famine, RUSI Says

An estimated 8.4 million Afghans, a quarter of the population, don’t have enough to eat because of drought and rising food prices and will depend on emergency supplies to survive this winter, the Royal United Services Institute said.

Famine poses a greater threat to the country than the spiralling Taliban insurgency and the international community must “mount an intensive air operation to deliver life-saving aid,” RUSI analyst Paul Smyth said in a briefing note.

The U.S-led airlift beginning in 1948 delivered more than 2.3 million metric tons of food, fuel and medicine to West Berlin to circumvent a Soviet blockade. Planes landed every three minutes in the effort that lasted 462 days. While the aid operation to Afghanistan would be smaller, it would be “strategically significant” and help prevent local frustration and anger against the government and NATO-led forces, the institute said.

Food shortages are compounding the problems facing President Hamid Karzai’s government, which is battling Taliban fighters mainly in the south and east of the country.

The United Nations and the government in Kabul appealed in July for $400 million to assist vulnerable Afghans in the nation of almost 33 million people.

“Reports already indicate that Afghans are migrating in search of food, some are eating grass and a tiny number have died of starvation,” RUSI said. “Afghanistan may be on the brink of a calamity which has the potential to undermine much of the progress which has been achieved there.”

Insurgent attacks on aid convoys compound the food shortages, RUSI said. “Help must come from farther afield, swiftly, and to any part of the country,” it said. “An airlift meets these demands.”

The country needs 25,000 metric tons of supplies before winter and another 70,000 tons before February 2009, RUSI said, citing the World Food Programme.

Airlifting such a quantity of aid “should be well within the international community’s military capacity, if it has the will,” RUSI said.

The WFP estimates that 24.9 million people in Afghanistan live below the poverty line. A risk assessment in 2005 found that 6.6 million Afghans don’t meet their minimum food requirements, a problem compounded by drought this year in the south, east and southwest of the nation, according to the UN agency.