The world must act now to stop Afghans starving

ON NOVEMBER 8THWFPUNWFP the World Food Programme (), a agency, said that its estimate of people “teetering on the edge of famine” worldwide had risen from 42m earlier this year to 45m. Remarkably, just one country accounts for almost all those 3m additional people. Afghanistan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.Some 23m Afghans, in a country of 38m, face acute hunger. Of those, 8.7m are in a state of emergency, the second-highest category in the ’s hierarchy of calamity. The classification manual explains that by the time the agency declares a famine, the highest category, it will be too late to avert the worst consequences “because many will have died”.