In Afghanistan, the population is growing rapidly and food production is completely inadequate.

So far, the gap has been filled by imports, financed directly or indirectly by the Western Alliance.

But with the end of the government overthrown by the West, the suspension of financial aid and the abandonment of many development projects by foreign partner organizations, a supply gap could quickly arise.

Tobias Piller

Economic correspondent for Italy and Greece based in Rome.

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Afghanistan last experienced hunger in large parts of the country in 2001 and 2008, which both times necessitated emergency intervention by the World Food Program (WFP).

The United Nations World Food and Agriculture Organization FAO wrote in a recent report that on average from 2018 to 2020, around 25.6 percent of Afghanistan's population suffer from malnutrition, or around 9.7 million people.

The proportion of undernourished people was significantly lower than in the comparative years 2004 to 2006, with a rate of 36.1 percent.

But the number of undernourished Afghans has remained constant to this day, as the population has now grown significantly.

Half of the farmers practice subsistence farming

Compared to 2001, when the Taliban lost control of Afghanistan, the UN's population has grown by 48 percent to an estimated 39.8 million by 2021. The birth rate close to 5 is among the highest in the world. In the past two decades, the city's population has almost doubled to more than 9 million. Kabul now has 4.3 million inhabitants, up from 2.5 million in 2001 and 1.9 million in 1995. That was when the Taliban first took power in the country. Afghanistan's second largest city, Kandahar, now has a population of around half a million, compared with 300,000 in 2001.

However, the country lacks efficient agriculture to feed the growing urban population. This is also due to the climatic conditions in the dry region, which is mostly between 600 and 3000 meters above sea level. 45 percent of the employees work in agriculture and generate 26 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) there. But these are large shares in a very small economic output.

Half of the farmers practice subsistence farming.

The country is almost twice the size of Germany, but only has half the German population.

According to the IMF, it generated a GDP of almost $ 20 billion in 2020.

The per capita income is 500 dollars, weighted according to purchasing power parity at 2011 prices, it was 1979 dollars in 2020.

Because foreign companies almost never invest in Afghanistan due to the difficult security situation, not even in the mining of natural resources, total goods exports to Afghanistan in 2020 amounted to 777 million dollars, according to the IMF.

However, according to the FAO, an amount equivalent to 300 percent of goods exported is necessary for imports of food into Afghanistan alone.

Dependence on food imports

So far, a huge current account deficit in relation to GDP has been financed by a variety of foreign aid. The latest country report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts the current account deficit for 2020 at 24.3 percent of GDP. However, if all the foreign aid including special support for the Covid pandemic were included, the current account surplus would be 14.2 percent, writes the IMF. The circumstances may also be somewhat obscured for diplomatic reasons, but behind the IMF's formulation, put simply, is the statement that in 2020 foreign aid will reach 40 percent of GDP.

The dependence on food imports is also the reason for the food insecurity in the country, says the person responsible for the FAO program in Afghanistan, Kaustubh Devale. Many improvements could make agriculture more productive, and the FAO would continue to work to achieve this. The political connections around the UN food organizations in Rome are spicy: the long-term oriented FAO has been headed by Chinese Director General Qu Dongyu for two years, while the World Food Program, which specializes in rapid rescue operations, is subordinate to the American Executive Director David Beasley, who was proposed by Donald Trump.