Pakistan: Food shortages stare at 33 million people as floods multiply miseries
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Pakistan’s backseat driver, Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, after an aerial survey of the flood-hit areas, said this week it would take his country several years to recover from the natural disaster. India can offer help, and even Pakistan’s Finance Minister Miftah Ismael favors it, but Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif cannot—it could antagonize his mentor General Bajwa and the Islamist organizations.
So, while the unprecedented rains have stopped, Pakistan may sink deeper into a series of staring crises: epidemics, food shortages, famine—capped by economic collapse. From a basket case to bankruptcy to a likely burial of a nation, the global community has long seen as a potentially failed state.
The media reported that millions of Pakistanis have land neither for raising crops, building homes, or burying their dead.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, 6.4 million flood victims in Pakistan need immediate humanitarian help. This week, Pakistan and the United Nations issued an appeal for USD 160 million in emergency funding for Islamabad.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Pakistan’s flooding, caused by weeks of unprecedented monsoon rains, is a signal to the world to step up action against climate change. He will visit Pakistan on September 9 to tour areas “most impacted by this unprecedented climate catastrophe,” UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric announced.
According to the media reports, Pakistan’s farming sector alone has gone back by 50 years because of complete erosion of fertile soil as 33 million people, affected by the record monsoon downpour, count their huge flood losses across a third of the landmass in the South Asian country.
The recent floods claimed over 1100 human lives as millions of cattle washed away across Pakistan, causing over USD 10 billion in losses. Already cash-strapped, Islamabad cannot buy enough food because of a lack of foreign exchange reserves. It is still hoping to get an IMF bailout package amid attempts to persuade the global terror funding watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), to take it off the hook and enable it to get global funding and investments.
Over 33 million people, or one in seven Pakistanis, have been affected by the catastrophic flooding, which has devastated a country already trying to revive a struggling economy.
And over a million homes have been damaged or destroyed in the past two-and-a-half months, displacing millions of people. Around a half million displaced people live in organized camps, while others have had to find their own shelter.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif said the floods have badly destroyed crops, and his government was considering importing wheat to avoid any shortage of food.
Pakistani health officials on Thursday reported an outbreak of waterborne diseases in areas hit by recent record-breaking flooding, as authorities stepped up efforts to ensure the provision of clean drinking water to hundreds of thousands of people who lost their homes in the disaster.
