Until recently the World Food Program was feeding 300,000 people in Afghanistan with subsidized bread. Then the Taliban stepped in and demanded that the WFP stop using women to collect information about the needs of other women in Kabul. The WFP refused, and had to stop selling the cheap bread after it was unable to purchase any more flour.
The WFP and the Taliban have been negotiating to try to find some way around the impasse, but neither side seems willing to budget. In a statement released by the Taliban, the ruling party said, “The dignity of Afghan women is more precious than anything else.”
Apparently that includes the more than five million Afghans who have almost no access to food at the moment and are likely to face starvation without a heightened aid effort; an aid effort which the Taliban is so far doing its best to sabotage.
Source:
Kabul facing bread shortages. The BBC, June 16, 2001.
The Afghanistan and World Food Program At Odds by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.