KABUL, Afghanistan — By 7 a.m., the bakers of Sang Tarashi Street have been hard at work for hours, shaping globs of dough, slapping them into a hot clay oven and flipping them out at just the right second. A stack of fresh flat bread called naan sits invitingly by the window, and the familiar morning smell wafts into the street.
But the scene outside the window has a desperate feel. Customers ask for half their normal breakfast purchases. A carpenter counts out the equivalent of 40 cents and buys two naans, far too little to feed his family of seven. A gaunt man in a threadbare tunic hovers nearby, looking ashamed, until the bakery owner notices him and tosses him a piece.
“When the price goes up, your stomach has to shrink,” said the man, a handcart hauler named Abdul Karim. “I used to be able to buy a sack of flour, and my wife could bake for us, but now it is far too expensive. I have to rely on this baker’s kindness so my children can eat. I do my best for them and work hard all day, but it is not enough anymore.”
As the global food crisis deepens, bringing inflation and shortages to many countries, Afghanistan — already facing a protracted drought, entrenched rural poverty and an ongoing conflict with Islamist insurgents — finds itself battling the added threat of hunger.
For generations, Afghans have depended on cheap, plentiful bread as their main staple. The country’s principal crop is wheat, and its farmers produce more than 5 million tons in a good year. Although that is not enough to feed the entire population, wheat can usually be trucked in from neighboring Pakistan.
Since February, however, a combination of local drought and regional shortages has driven the price of flour here to once-unimaginable levels — as much as $50 for a 40-pound sack. Pakistan, also worried about how to feed 160 million-plus people, has closed its borders to food exports, as have a number of other largely agricultural countries anxious to stave off domestic hardship and political unrest.
So far, Afghan authorities and international charities have prevented the wheat flour shortage from reaching crisis proportions by finding emergency sources. The government has trucked in tons of flour from Kazakhstan, and the U.N. World Food Program has raised money to import 85,000 tons from major wheat-producing countries such as Canada and Australia.
In addition, enterprising smugglers have continued to bring in truck after truck piled with sacks of flour from Pakistan. Sacks are said to cross the border surreptitiously on donkey-back, via bribery at official crossing spots and buried deep inside cargo trucks.
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