WFP APPEALS FOR URGENT FOOD FOR 400,000 DESPERATE PEOPLE IN TAJIKISTAN
Press Release
WFP/1032
WFP APPEALS FOR URGENT FOOD FOR 400,000 DESPERATE PEOPLE IN TAJIKISTAN
19960327 ROME, 27 March (WFP) -- At least 400,000 people risk starvation in Tajikistan as political and economic conditions continue to deteriorate in Tejikistan, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned today.The WFP, food aid organization of the United Nations, urged donors to provide $19 million for some 33,000 tons of food commodities just to cover the most urgent humanitarian needs in the country up to 31 March 1997. Its existing food supplies -- some 4,000 tons -- will run out by mid-May.
Some 620,000 people need emergency food assistance in Tajikistan. Of those, the food aid agency is targeting 400,000 of the most desperate -- war widows with children, orphans, elderly and the disabled.
Before civil war broke out in Tajikistan in 1992, these groups were dependent on the State, which no longer can support them. Without relief food, there is a real risk of starvation among these people, WFP officials said.
"In many villages, people are overcome by food shortages to the point that some said that they were considering suicide rather than suffer hunger", said Trevor Martin, WFP Country Director in Tajikistan. "Monitors came across villages with as many as 85 per cent of the population living under extreme poverty."
Food shortages are most acute in the southern Khation region, which was particularly affected by the civil war, and in the mountainous eastern Gorno Badakhshan and Garm regions.
Tajikistan is the poorest and least developed republic of the former Soviet Union. The country's economy has deteriorated steadily since the break-up of the former Soviet Union. Annual inflation runs more than 500 per cent. A quarter of the population is unemployed, and even those who are employed have trouble getting paid, according to aid officials.
A shortage of barter goods, limited currency reserves and the country's national debt have reduced imports to Tajikistan since 1991. Food aid has, thus, become a large proportion of total cereal imports.
- 2 - Press Release WFP/1032 27 March 1996
Emergency food rations of the WFP are valued at $4.30 per person per month, almost three times the salary of a clerk and double the salary of a doctor. WFP food rations cover 40 per cent of the total daily calorie requirement.
The Programme, the leading food aid agency in the former Soviet republic, began emergency operations in mid-1993 after the civil war killed some 50,000 people and displaced half a million others.
A lack of resources has forced the WFP to cut the number of beneficiaries receiving emergency rations.
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