More than 250,000 families in the capital Kabul started receiving ten flat 'Naan' breads per day in the first phase of the project.
President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani has said the bread distribution program was also taking place in other cities as rising prices were hitting what is already one of the poorest countries in the world, with more than half of the population living below the poverty line.
Afghanistan's headline inflation was an annual 12.1% in April and food inflation stood at 27%, up from 11% a month earlier, said Omar Joya, an economist at the independent Biruni Institute think-tank in Kabul, who had access to the government's latest consumer price data.