Food Drops Are Given Mixed Reviews

Although airdrops of food over Afghanistan have captured the public’s attention, international relief organizations say the drops cannot feed the country’s starving millions and they are eager to resume truck convoys that were halted when hostilities began.

Some relief workers welcomed U.S. military drops of 37,500 humanitarian daily rations on each of the first two days of bombing. Others expressed concern that the food drops were primarily intended for political consumption elsewhere in the Muslim world and gave the U.S. public a false impression of meeting Afghanistan’s needs.

In either case, all argue that the challenge of feeding millions of Afghans threatened by famine can be met only by land.

“No relief agency would ever prefer just dropping food,” said Anwar Khan, development coordinator for Islamic Relief, which has offices in Burbank. “Don’t think this is fixing the problem. This is a Band-Aid on an open wound. Sure, it’s helping. But there’s still a lot of blood coming out.”

Hundreds of thousands of tons of wheat and food items are on their way to the region--much of it pledged by the United States before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But relief workers say that, even before the aerial war broke out, they were having a hard time getting the food to the people in need, a logistical nightmare they fear is only growing worse.

“There’s a lot of contingency planning going on right now,” said Neal Keny-Guyer, head of Mercy Corps. “Everyone’s looking to see if we can open a secure food pipeline from Pakistan, Tajikistan or even Iran.”

The goal is to feed about 6 million people in Afghanistan, many of whom are internal refugees fleeing toward one of the country’s borders. Even before the U.S.-led airstrikes, living conditions in Afghanistan were termed “catastrophic” by relief agencies.

“The situation is grim,” said Abigail Spring of the World Food Program--a United Nations organization and the largest provider of food to the region. Before Sunday’s strikes, Spring said relief groups still were able to ship limited supplies of food by truck, although with greater difficulty in recent weeks due to the expulsion of foreign relief workers.

After Sept. 11, Spring said, they could feed about 1.7 million people. Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s needy population grew from 3.8 million to 5.5 million.

Still, many relief workers said it was important to view the limited airdrops in the overall context of U.S. aid. President Bush has pledged to spend $320 million in the new fiscal year, up from $183 million in fiscal 2001.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was questioned about how much good the airdropped food would do.

“It is quite true that 37,000 rations in a day do not feed millions of human beings,” he said. “On the other hand, if you were one of the starving people who got one of the rations, you’d be appreciative.”

And he disputed an assertion that the World Food Program’s decision to temporarily halt convoys had produced a net loss in food supplies to Afghanistan. “What you have is a group of people, the Taliban, that have repressed the Afghan people, contributed to their starvation,” Rumsfeld said.

Aid workers said Taliban leaders mostly had kept out of the way of efforts to feed Afghans--in contrast to previous famine relief efforts in Africa and elsewhere.

Jim Jennings, president of the humanitarian aid organization Conscience International, said he was concerned that the food drops amounted to “psyops”--psychological operations--at home.

“They [military planners] know the American people feel very positive about humanitarian aid,” he said. “And so they sort of sandwiched the bombs between these very thin humanitarian efforts.”