Nic Robertson: Food aid arrives in Afghanistan

Correspondent Nic Robertson

(CNN) -- The first convoy of emergency food aid since the terrorist attacks reached Afghanistan's capital city today, where millions of people are facing starvation. The World Food Programme, a United Nations agency that fights global hunger, delivered more than 200 tons of wheat and other supplies to Kabul. CNN Anchor Aaron Brown spoke with correspondent Nic Robertson who is reporting from Quetta, Pakistan.

AARON BROWN: Nic Robertson is in Pakistan. He has more on the food aid, the refugees and other developments there. Nic?

NIC ROBERTSON: Well, Aaron, the World Food Programme says that this successful delivery today to Kabul will herald more deliveries in coming days. They hope to send another 1,000 tons to Kabul, some 100 tons way across (to the) west of Afghanistan to Herat, where there are 2,000 displaced people, people displaced from central Afghanistan by the drought, completely dependent on food handouts. They hope to get food to them.

And also, 900 tons they hope to send in from Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (to northern Afghanistan). They say there are 300,000 people there who could face running out of food by the end of this week. The reason the World Food Programme says that it will get its supplies going again is that they can now guarantee that they can get them out to the people that need it. And that is because the trucks that had been recently busy ferrying people out of the cities to the countryside are now free again.

The World Food Programme also says that the food prices in Afghanistan have gone up some 20 percent (or more). That does give all the U.N. agencies huge cause for concern, because that is the trigger for humanitarian catastrophe inside Afghanistan. Once the cost of food goes beyond the reach of most people, then people may start moving toward the borders.

And another interesting development today inside Afghanistan, from people we speak to in Kandahar, the spiritual heartland of the Taliban: (motorists) driving around that city late in the afternoon today, calling for people to come out and demonstrate at 11 o'clock Kandahar time tomorrow (Tuesday). We haven't seen demonstrations on the streets of Kandahar so far.

BROWN: Nic, you have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. Is there an infrastructure and a mechanism to get this food delivered to the people who are hungry?

ROBERTSON: There is, but it is severely hampered at the moment. The mechanism is the World Food Programme staff, essentially. They work from offices in the main cities, and then deliver it out to the remote villages and to the camps of displaced people. They are hampered because the international staff are no longer there who generally direct the work.

The local staff -- and there are several hundred of them -- are also hampered because they don't have access to communications equipment. That is sealed in their offices, the World Food Programme says, by the Taliban; and they are further hampered as well because in some areas -- Mazar-e-Sharif in the north -- there are reports of food storage facilities being looted.

But the World Food Programme says today that they are confident that all their stores are secure at this time. Otherwise they say they just wouldn't send in more food into Afghanistan. That is their one deciding factor, whether or not to send food in, if it is secure and if they can get it to the right people -- which is, they say, some 6 to 7 million needy people inside Afghanistan.

BROWN: One of the things you hear on this side of the world is a concern that if these international food shipments go on, they will be used to support the army, they will be used to support government workers -- but won't necessarily get to those people who might be friendly to the United States and the U.S. side, or just to people who are hungry out in the world, out in the rural areas.

ROBERTSON: And, of course, without proper administrative structures for these international aid agencies inside the country, that is something that is very, very difficult to control. And it of course has been a concern, through crises in the past, where humanitarian organizations have to send food into ... warlike situations. They don't know if it is going to end up with the fighters or the people.

And the U.N. says they are keeping a very, very close eye on that at this time. But it is of course very, very difficult for them without international staff there to oversee and administer what happened. It is very difficult to make sure that it doesn't go to essentially the wrong people.

And if normal food supplies that would normally appear in the domestic market for sale on the streets -- if that dries up then the temptation could well be there for administrations to remove and resupply themselves from humanitarian supplies. Very, very difficult for aid agencies at this time, Aaron.