Highlights related to food security

Economic context/access to food:

• Inflation is predominantly influenced by factors such as the exchange rate, international energy and food prices, and domestic demand dynamics. Notably, headline inflation experienced a significant surge following the events of August 2021, driven primarily by the sharp depreciation of the exchange rate, the loss of output and productive capacity, and the global increase in food and fuel prices, largely attributed to the conflict in Ukraine. Consequently, the overall inflation rate climbed to 18.3 percent, while food inflation reached as high as 24.9 percent in July 2022 (Figure 9).

Humanitarian response:

• International assistance helped save millions of Afghans from starvation, sustained delivery of essential social services and ensured continuation of hundreds of thousands of livelihoods. There is a decrease in the number of people who are categorized as severely food insecure from 19.7 million in Mar-Apr 2022, to an estimated 15.2 million in August 2023. Households are reporting improvements in their housing conditions, electricity access and heating in 2023, compared to 2021-2022. Household incomes and expenditures grew significantly in 2023. Nonetheless, over 50 percent of households spend more than 100 percent of their incomes just to meet subsistence needs resulting in rising household debt.
• Almost two-thirds of Afghan households continue to grapple with extremely high levels of deprivation, two years following the regime change. Using data from nationally representative household surveys, this report constructs a welfare index - the Subsistence Insecurity Index (SII) - which examines different dimensions of household subsistence while identifying the proportion of households that are subsistence insecure. In 2023, 69 percent of Afghan people are subsistence insecure, in that they lack access to the healthcare, essential items, suitable living conditions, and employment opportunities that are necessary for basic subsistence-level living. This shows a 19 percent improvement compared to 85 percent in 2022.
• Humanitarian assistance is declining at a time when an overwhelming majority of the Afghan population remain highly vulnerable, and subsistence insecurities remain high. The proportion of Afghan households that received humanitarian assistance as cash or in-kind nearly halved in 2023 (17 percent) compared to 2022 (30 percent). 89 percent of households identify food as their primary need in 2023, marginally down from 91 percent a year before. The small improvements in humanitarian conditions over the past two years are very likely to reverse quickly if international assistance for humanitarian response continues to diminish and if local economic stabilization is not met.