Afghanistan Adds Hunger to Its Worries

"In my area, people have no choice but to grow poppies," said Mohammed Anwar, a member of parliament from Helmand province, the country's premier poppy-growing region. "Most of our farmers are poor. They don't have money to buy tractors or generator fuel. They don't have storage or irrigation facilities. With wheat, you have to water five or six times a season. With poppies, you water only once, and you earn so much more."

Only a small fraction of Afghanistan's arable land is planted with poppies, while about 90 percent is wheat. Last year, Afghan farmers had a good wheat yield of 5.6 million tons, but there was still a shortfall of half a million tons that had to be supplemented with Pakistani imports.

Tekeste Tekie, the senior official here for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said that with better seeds and more irrigation, Afghanistan should be able to feed itself. But he also said agricultural development has been neglected, with half the nation's farmland still dependent on rainfall and vulnerable to drought.

"Even if every acre was switched to wheat, there would still be shortages," Tekie said. The FAO is developing high-yield seeds in projects across the country, but more help is needed. "Agriculture has not been given the attention it deserves," he said, "but with these soaring prices, suddenly everyone is talking about it."

At the central flour market in Kabul, there is little evidence of a shortage. Laborers unload sack after sack of smuggled flour from Pakistani trucks, and warehouses are piled high with sacks labeled in English, Urdu and Russian.

But amid the bustle of apparent plenty wander figures of desperate want -- women in blue burqas clutching empty sacks, hovering next to cargo trucks and peering into gloomy warehouses, hoping to glean spilled flour from the floors.

"We used to sell wheat from Helmand in the south, from Kunduz in the north, but now their people come here to buy from us," said Abdul Wahab, a flour dealer. He ticked off a list of causes: the drought, the government, the poppy boom, the Pakistani mafia and NATO. "There are troops from 30 countries here, but they should worry less about al-Qaeda and more about rebuilding our country," Wahab said.

In the bakeries of Kabul, teams of heat-flushed workers still ply their ancestral skills with precise coordination. Sitting cross-legged on a platform, they are in constant motion. One man forms a dough ball, the next weighs it, the next flattens it, the next leans over the oven and slaps it in, then waits a few minutes and tosses it with tongs onto the fresh-baked stack.

Zabiullah, 21, the window man at the Sang Tarashi bakery and the son of the longtime owner, hands out flats of naan and drops crumpled bills into a wooden box. Surveying the fringe of early morning beggars, he shakes his head.

"In my whole life, even in the civil war, we did not see prices this high," he said. "Now the fighting is long over, but flour is three times higher. Some of our old customers come and ask, 'In the name of God, please give me some bread,' " he said sadly. "How can I refuse them?"