By GEOFF CUMMING and AGENCIES
Two million Afghan civilians urgently need food to get them through the winter - but the US bombing campaign is threatening an even worse famine next year.
With foreign food convoys severely hampered by the war, relief agencies say the bombing is also disrupting the planting of crops that normally provide 80 per cent of Afghanistan's annual grain harvest.
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) director-general Jacques Diouf says the already grave food shortage will be further aggravated.
Afghan farmers will produce significantly less than the 2 million tonnes of cereals predicted by UN assessors for the year to next June.
That estimate, five months old, found that Afghanistan would need 2.2 million tonnes of imported food for the year.
The assessment in May had found mounting evidence of famine. Afghans were eating substantially less, they had far less money to buy food and other goods, there were distress sales of livestock, and grain prices were soaring.
At the same time, numbers of destitute, displaced people and refugees were rising rapidly.
With the US-led military campaign coming on top of three consecutive years of drought, and severe economic disruptions caused by more than a decade of civil war, the FAO says a huge foreign food aid effort is needed. It has asked for $US80 million to provide short-term help to farmers.
For long-term rehabilitation of the devastated agriculture and livestock sector, an additional $US122 million is sought.
Another 1300 tonnes of vitally needed wheat reached Kabul on Thursday in a 14-truck convoy from Pakistan.
But World Food Programme (WFP) executive director Catherine Bertini warned of the dangers of a "humanitarian catastrophe" unless the programme met its target of 52,000 tonnes of food a month.
The WFP feeds 1.7 million people a day inside the country and fears up to 7.5 million people could eventually need aid to survive the winter.
Relief workers left in Afghanistan are operating under increasing adversity.
On Tuesday, US bombs inadvertently hit Red Cross warehouses in Kabul. Tonnes of wheat and other supplies were destroyed.
On Thursday, the Taleban returned one of two WFP grain warehouses commandeered by their armed fighters two days earlier.
The 5300 tonnes of grain in the Kabul warehouse apparently remained intact. There was no word on the status of the other warehouse, in Kandahar, also taken at gunpoint on Tuesday.
Several relief agency offices and UN-backed landmine removal programmes have been raided at gunpoint.
Medecins Sans Frontieres shut medical relief programmes in two cities on Thursday after Taleban gangs looted them of medicine, equipment and vehicles.
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