"Yet again, a new cold winter is coming but I have no enough money to buy firewood after buying food staff with price increasing week by week," said a resident in the Afghan capital of Kabul, Wali Khan, who came to buy brushwood in a firewood market.
Khan, 45, head of an 11-member family, said he and two of his sons have jobs with low income to feed the big family, who lives in a slum neighborhood in south of Kabul.
"I have a small stall near my house, selling essential articles and foodstuff but I cannot afford this living as the living cost rises and it's difficult to have a stable livelihood here over the past couples of years," Khan said while carrying some firewood to a scale with all weights from river stones instead of standard metal ones. "Living cost has been rising constantly while suicide bombings and explosion occurred every day in this country," Khan said.
In Kabul, some 80 percent of the population lives in unplanned settlements where poor sanitation and lack of access to potable water is common and nearly all of the buildings has no central heating system.
Although there is no official statistics, it is believed that some nine million Afghans live under poverty line and rely on only one U.S. dollar income daily in Afghanistan.
"Due to the past three decades of war, investment in the agriculture has dropped by 43 percent," Afghan Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation Minister Mohammad Asif Rahimi was quoted as saying by a local popular English newspaper -- The Outlook Afghanistan on Monday.