Afghanistan’s poverty rate has worsened sharply over the past five years as the economy has stalled and the Taliban insurgency has spread, with more than half the population living on less than a dollar a day, a survey published on Monday showed, Reuters reported. The Afghanistan Living Conditions Survey, a joint study by the European Union and Afghanistan’s Central Statistics Organization, showed the national poverty rate rising to 55% in 2016-17 from 38% in 2011-12. “The high poverty rates represent the combined effect of stagnating economic growth, increasing demographic pressures, and a deteriorating security situation,” Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank director for Afghanistan, said in a commentary about the survey. The report underlines the problems facing the western-backed government in Kabul which needs economic growth to help replace foreign aid and to provide jobs for its fast-growing population. As international forces have withdrawn and the billions of dollars in foreign aid that once poured in have dried up, Afghanistan’s battered agricultural economy has struggled.
