Farmers give flour to help Afghan widows, children

WASHINGTON -- A German businessman and a North Dakota farmer are working together to deliver 2 million pounds of flour to widows and their children in Afghanistan, where food staples are badly needed.

Klaus Zumwinkel, chairman of Deutsche Post, and Robert Carlson, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union, say they were prompted to help by their own childhood memories of relief efforts.

Zumwinkel recalls U.S. aid arriving in Germany just after World War II. Carlson remembers standing in the fields of his family's farm, watching his father harvest wheat that was donated to India.

Carlson urged fellow North Dakota farmers to donate wheat to the Afghan relief effort.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., got the farmers together with CARE, the international relief agency, and Deutsch Post.

"We have 16,000 people, direct employees, in the United States," said Zumwinkel, whose company owns DHL International, the U.S.-based parcel delivery company. "We should not only do business here, we should be good corporate citizens."

The plan is for DHL trucks to pick up the bagged, milled and fortified flour in Grand Forks, N.D., during the first week of June. The wheat will be loaded onto a ship sailing to Karachi, Pakistan. From there, it will be trucked into Kabul, Afghanistan, where CARE will see that it goes to widows and their children.

The flour should feed about 8,500 people for a year, according to CARE.

Karen Robbins, a fund-raiser and manager for CARE, returned from a trip to Kabul in March. She said more than 40,000 widows live in the impoverished Afghan capital.

"In many cases, what we give these families is the only food they get," Robbins said. "These people, they tell you their stories, and you just want to break down."