Afghanistan is beginning to feel the real fear of starvation.
The weather turns from early autumn warmth to bitter cold.
Several areas are reporting drought, adding to the sense of growing disaster.
At Maidan Wardak, 80 kilometers west of Kabul, several hundred people gathered in the hope of receiving flour from the official distribution point.
The flour was provided by the World Food Program.
Taliban soldiers were monitoring the crowd, it was fairly quiet, but the people who were told they were not entitled to the gift were angry and scared.
"Winter is almost here," said an old man.
"I don't know how I'll survive if I can't make bread."
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The World Food Program (WFP) is faced with the need to increase supplies in Afghanistan to help more than 22 million people.
If the weather is bad this winter as experts predict, it is estimated that a large number of people are at risk of starvation.
I spoke with VFP Executive Director David Beasley when he visited Kabul on Sunday.
His analysis of the situation was alarming.
"It's as bad as you can imagine," Beasley said.
"In fact, this is currently the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
"Ninety-five percent of people don't have enough food, and now we're watching 23 million people march toward starvation," he added.
"The next six months will be catastrophic. It will be hell on Earth."
Before the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August, there was confidence that President Ashraf Ghani's government would be able to deal with the threat of a severe winter, with the help of the international community.
That aid disappeared when the government fell.
Western countries have suspended aid to Afghanistan on the grounds that they do not want to align themselves with the Taliban regime, which bans girls from education and advocates reintroducing the full range of Sharia punishments.
But will these countries now stand by and allow millions of innocent people to face starvation?
Beasley calls on the governments and billionaires of the developed world to help urgently.
"My message to world leaders and billionaires: imagine this is your daughter or your son or your grandchild who is going to starve to death," he said.
"You would do everything you could, and when there is $400 trillion worth of wealth in the world today, we should all be ashamed.
"We let children die of hunger. Shame on us. Nobody cares about those children," adds the executive director of VFP.
In the city of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, where in 2001 the Taliban destroyed the ancient and beautiful statues of the Buddha carved into the cliff in the 6th century, we went to meet the widow Fatima and her seven children, aged three to 16.
Her husband recently died of stomach cancer.
They are very poor and live in a cave near a huge niche in the cliff where one of the Buddhas once stood.
Under the last government, Fatima was able to get fairly regular supplies of flour and oil, but this has now been stopped by the Taliban.
Fatima earned a little money by weeding the land for a nearby farmer.
Now, however, the drought that has hit the area means that fewer crops have survived, and there is no work for her.
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"I'm scared," she says.
"I have nothing to give the children to eat. Soon I will have to go out and beg."
Some parents sold their daughters to older men for marriage.
Fatima refused.
But if the food supply does not continue, she and her children will face real hunger.
Now snow is beginning to settle on the nearby mountain peaks and there is a sharp chill in the air.
Winter is coming soon, and a huge number of people like Fatima and her family will be on the brink of disaster.
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