Save the Children’s Andrew Wander tells First News about the impact that drought has had on Afghanistan and how it is affecting children.

What is the situation in Afghanistan?

In rural northern Afghanistan, the weather matters.

Families living in remote mountain villages rely on rain to grow food and, when winter comes, the snow cuts them off for months. The food they’ve grown allows them to survive the winter. Without it, they can be snowed in for weeks without supplies.

When the rains didn’t fall in 14 provinces of Afghanistan last year, families knew their crops wouldn’t grow. They knew that, without crops, they would have nothing to sell, no money to buy supplies and no stores of home-grown food. And they knew that, when winter arrived, they’d be left desperately short of the basics they need to survive. They knew all this but they could do nothing about it. Shortages of crops meant that prices began to increase; the little money that families had was not enough to afford sought-after food supplies. Now, as the first snows begin to fall, millions of people are facing a winter without enough to eat.

Changing diet

Save the Children work in Afghanistan helping families already facing war and terrible poverty. In the north, where the drought is worst, parents have told us that they have nothing to feed their children but bread and tea. Vegetables, once part of the daily diet, are an occasional treat, and meat has become a luxury few can afford. As Save the Children work with children all over the world, we know how dangerous such a diet can be. Growing children need all sorts of different foods to be healthy. Too much of one thing is almost always a bad thing. When there is only one food available, like bread, children become ill and, in Afghanistan, it can be hard for the poorest families to find medical treatment.

Why is it so serious now?

The number of children in Afghanistan who need to see a doctor or nurse because they don’t have enough food is growing. In the worst cases children could die because the rain they rely on for food didn’t fall.

Greater effects

Just as bad, the wells villagers rely on for drinking water have dried up. We know families are already walking miles to find clean water to drink but, as the weather gets worse, the concern is that they will risk drinking dirty water rather than face long treks through the winter storms.

How are Save the Children helping?

Save the Children and other aid agencies are already helping families caught up in the drought, doing our best to make sure the children have enough to eat to survive the bitter winter.

We’re giving money to families who need to buy food, and special emergencies staff from Save the Children have travelled to Afghanistan to work on helping these families get through the winter.

Race against time

We know we have to act fast to get help to the millions of people who need it. It is a race against time to reach families before the snow does. Our work will save thousands of lives.

As a charity, that work is paid for by people around the UK, people who believe, in 2012, that no child should die because not enough rain has fallen.