Afghani’s freefall worries UN humanitarian aid chief

KABUL (Pajhwok): UN humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths says Afghanistan needs flexible and sustained international funding before the end of this year to prevent further collapse of the country’s economy, a media report said on Tuesday.

“What we have become very painfully aware of in recent weeks is that the freefall of the economy is much more violent, severe and urgent than we feared,” Griffiths told VOA recently. “We thought we would manage to survive the winter with pure humanitarian assistance. We now know it’s not enough. We need more.”

Over the past two decades, Afghanistan’s economy heavily depended on foreign aid to survive. Some 75% of the former government’s budget was donor-funded, as was 40% of its GDP.

The UN aid chief said currently the cash required to run the massive humanitarian operation is not available inside the country. The United Nations has appealed for $4.4 billion to assist 23 million Afghans next year – to deal with what has become its largest humanitarian crisis.

Griffiths says there is a solution – a currency swap — but it must be finalized and fast.

“We need to provide a facility to allow dollars outside the country to be exchanged for Afghanis, the local currency inside Afghanistan. We need that to be dependable, sustainable and to scale,” he told VOA.

On Dec. 21, Griffiths plans to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Washington. He said his key message will be that the UN needs flexible funding which will not land in the hands of the Taliban.

“We also want to send the same message to Congress: that the people of Afghanistan need support, and that supporting them is not support to the Taliban, it’s support to the people of Afghanistan. These are two different things,” the UN humanitarian chief said.

Griffiths emphasized that the Americans have been very active in granting humanitarian exemptions to their sanctions and pushing for them at the U.N. Security Council, which has its own sanctions on Taliban elements.

But the exemptions have not been enough to improve the confidence of international banks and businessmen, who fear inadvertently violating them if they do business with Afghanistan.

Nh/ma

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