KABUL, Nov 17: Some 840,000 dollars’ worth of food destined for needy Afghans has been lost so far this year in attacks, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday.

From January to mid-November there were 25 armed attacks against WFP convoys inside Afghanistan, resulting in the loss of about 870 tonnes of food worth 520,000 dollars, it said in a statement.

Another 610 tonnes, valued at 320,000 dollars, was lost in the northwest frontier area of Pakistan en route to Afghanistan, it said.

The WFP did not make clear who was behind all of the violence, but attacks are most often blamed on bandits and militants, including those from Taliban.

The agency said rising food prices, drought and poverty mean about nine million people in Afghanistan need food assistance, but volatile security has made it difficult to deliver food to them.

“Not only in the south and southwestern regions where the situation has been continuously deteriorating, now some eastern and central provinces are also affected by increasing insecurity which hinders and can delay WFP’s food movement,” the statement said.

The programme has only managed to distribute about 23,000 of a planned 36,000 tonnes of food to some 950,000 needy Afghans ahead of winter, it said.

The government and its donors need to invest in high-yielding seed varieties to help Afghanistan produce all the food it needs, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) representative Tekeste Tekie told reporters on Monday.—AFP