NILI, Afghanistan—The farmer squats barefoot on packed earth in front of his two-room mud house. He has looked at his bags of wheat, he says, and counted the days.

Ghulam Sakhi, 50, says his family will run out of food in mid-January— only a third of the way through Afghanistan’s frigid winter.

As the days shorten and the nights grow colder, this winter threatens to be Afghanistan’s most desperate in nearly two decades.

Life has always been hard in this poor, war-ravaged land, but this year a combination of drought, high food prices and Taliban attacks on supply routes could leave a bigger shortage than emergency food aid can cover.

In a country already struggling to combat a strengthening Taliban insurgency, it’s a crisis that is testing an overstretched government’s limits.

Day Kundi, the central province where Sakhi lives, is usually one of the hardest hit by snows and food shortages, but is also relatively peaceful. So Sakhi’s family worries less about war and more about simply being forgotten.

The couple and their nine children depend on flatbread made from wheat to survive the winter in a barren mountain valley dotted with dusty almond trees and the occasional sheep. They drink water, or tea if they have a little extra money.

Once snow blocks the roads in mid-December, the entire town of Nili lives off stored food until spring.

Sakhi’s gray beard and leathery face make him look older than he is. He works on a farm and gets part of the wheat he harvests, but the yield was smaller this year. And he has just used some of his last money to travel 200 miles to Kabul for tuberculosis treatment.

The family usually starts the winter burning wood, then dried leaves and dung patties when the wood runs out. This year, they have no wood at all.

But food will be the hardest: Wheat is scarcer and more expensive.

Drought cut Afghanistan’s wheat production to 2.6 million metric tons this year from 4.3 million metric tons in 2007, according to the Agriculture Ministry. Neighboring Pakistan, the main source of Afghan food imports, is suffering its own wheat shortages and has imposed stiff export controls.

So the average price of wheat has nearly doubled from last year, to about 14 Afghanis (28 cents) a pound, according to the U.N.’s World Food Program.

Sakhi, who wears a dingy prayer cap and a sweater over a baggy tunic and pants, has 4 1/2 bags of wheat piled against a wall in a dark corner of his house. When that runs out, he’ll borrow from local shopkeepers.

However, “This year even the shopkeepers don’t have enough,” he said.

Aid agencies and the Afghan government are increasing road convoys to deliver wheat and beans to remote regions before the snows. They are considering helicopter drops for the least accessible areas.

The World Food Program says it expects to have 36,000 metric tons of food in place for distribution by Dec. 1. That’s enough to feed 950,000 people across more than 20 provinces until the roads reopen in the spring.

But even in a normal year, about 8.4 million Afghans, a fourth of the population, are undernourished, according to government statistics.

“It’s evident that WFP cannot cover the entire needs of the country,” said Stefano Porretti, the agency’s Afghanistan director.

President Hamid Karzai said this month that the government has spent “many hundred millions of dollars” on wheat for winter emergencies and that aid is getting to remote areas as planned. But he also warned: “This does not mean that there will not be shortages.”

In western Ghor province, Police Chief Gen. Shah Jahan Noori said the province needs 27,000 metric tons of wheat but will get only 13,000 metric tons of food aid.

Nasrullah Sadeqizada Nili, a lawmaker representing Day Kundi province, said many families are trying to sell their cattle—trading in their last bit of security for the grain it will buy. But the resulting beef glut has halved the price of a cow.

“Nobody is buying the cattle. The butchers refuse because they say no one has money to buy meat,” he said.