KABUL, Oct 20: Despite improved agricultural production, an estimated four million Afghans will face food shortage over the next 12 months as a result of years of drought, the United Nations World Food Program warned on Sunday.

About 1.4 million of those people are living in areas that will be difficult to access with the onset of winter in mid-November.

In order to reach many of the isolated communities, the UN agency would distribute 51,000 metric tons of wheat before winter, said spokesman Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri in a statement.

The WFP has distributed 8,000 metric tons of food aid from warehouses in four locations, the statement said.

The UN officials say this year’s cereal harvest was 80 per cent better than the previous year because of increased rainfall, but pockets of drought still remain, particularly in central and southern Afghanistan.

“There are still large numbers of vulnerable people who have been affected by conflict and several years of drought,” the statement said.

“It should be emphasized that, although the overall situation is improving, there are still areas of low agricultural production due to limited or late rainfall,” it said.

The UN children’s agency said it was launching a three-day campaign on Tuesday to vaccinate 5.9 million children against polio.

Unicef denied a report that a girls’ school in Narkh district in Wardak had been destroyed by armed assailants. Unicef officials visited the school and found no evidence that it had been attacked.

A small explosion went off on Tuesday at a school in Kandahar, injuring a teacher. The blast was the latest in a series of unexplained attacks on schools in recent weeks.—APP