----- forwarded message -----
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 07:37:26 -0000
From: "nicholasd108" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Fwd:  Graveyards outgrow villages in Afghan starvation belt

<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia_china/story.jsp?story=118094


Graveyards outgrow villages in Afghan starvation belt
By David Loyn
04 February 2002

Grain has become the only currency that matters in
Afghanistan's hunger belt, now into its fourth year of
a drought, which has destroyed the rural economy.

In the remote mountain villages of the Badghis
province in the west, people have been reduced to
selling their daughters for grain. Ahmed Shah sold his
seven-year-old daughter for five sacks of wheat. And
he is just one of dozens of men who Oxfam believe have
sold their daughters. For many years an elaborate
dowry system has ensured that girls have a value for
marriage. But the price has never been so low before,
nor the arrangements so desperate.

In one village I visited, Sia Sangh, which is two
hours' walk from the nearest road, the graveyard looks
bigger than the village, every house seems to have
lost at least one family member. And some houses are
completely empty because of death through diseases
connected with hunger. TB has taken hold in the area,
and there are no doctors. Men sit listlessly on their
doorsteps, some too weak to make the walk across rough
mountain paths to collect food. A dried-up water
course goes through the centre of the village. In
better times it carried the melted snow off the peaks
in the spring. But now there is only a light dusting
of snow, which will not fill the aquifers that feed
the village well. More remote mountain villages higher
up now have no wells at all, so that villagers are
forced to walk for up to a day to collect water.

Tahir Shah, a boy dressed in rags, said that his whole
family had died in the past year, including his father
and mother, three sisters and one brother. He lives
with relatives. The tight clan structures here have
kept away the worst effects of the drought but this
winter has been the harshest yet, mainly because of
the disruption to aid supplies caused by the fighting
and the American bombing.

Many families have left this region in desperation to
fill the squalid refugee camps around the western city
of Herat. Half of the houses in Sia Sangh are empty,
and the cumulative effects of the prolonged crisis
have had disastrous consequences. Even until last
summer there were still a few animals left. Now the
sheep and cattle have all been eaten or sold, so the
only animals that remain are donkeys used as pack
animals.

On the narrow track that snakes around the ravine up
to the village I met Abdullah Shah with three donkeys
carrying sacks of wheat. But they had not come
directly from aid distribution stock. He had
"borrowed'' them from the bazaar after giving all of
the wheat he received in aid last month to
grain-lenders.

Much of the first shipment of food that Oxfam made
last month went directly to the grain lenders. They
had given food on credit, and now the most vulnerable
have to pay them before they can take any wheat for
themselves. Pumping in enough food to fill the vacuum
has not yet been possible. The author is a BBC foreign
correspondent.

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