Relief arrives in ‘overwhelmed’ Pakistan where 33m need help
Aid efforts are being ramped up across Pakistan to help the tens of millions of people affected by devastating floods.
More than 1,100 people have been killed and a third of the country flooded in what a government minister described as “climate dystopia on our doorstep”. Roads and bridges have been washed away, making it harder to deliver aid to the more than 33 million people affected; they account for over 15 per cent of the population.
Recovery could cost more than £8 billion, according to Ahsan Iqbal, the planning minister. He warned of food shortages in the coming months and suggested that the floods were worse than those in 2010, the deadliest in the country’s history, which killed more than 2,000 people.
South Asia’s annual monsoon is an essential part of its weather system, responsible for irrigating crops and replenishing lakes after the summer heat, but can also unleash destruction, combined with the flow from melted glaciers. These rains could hardly have come at a worse time for a country on the brink of economic collapse.
Pakistan appealed for emergency international help on Sunday, with the first aid flown in later that day from Turkey.
The prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, toured the north of the country by helicopter to oversee relief operations and said that the monsoon rains were “unprecedented in the past 30 years”.
Sherry Rehman, the climate minister, called it “the monster monsoon of the decade”. She added: “What we see now is an ocean of water submerging entire districts. This is very far from a normal monsoon — it is climate dystopia at our doorstep.”
Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, the foreign minister, warned that Pakistan’s dire economic situation would dramatically worsen without aid. “I would expect not only the International Monetary Fund but the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation,” he said. “I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words . . . It is overwhelming.”
The situation is particularly acute in the flooded breadbasket provinces of Sindh and Punjab, which grow high-quality basmati rice for consumption at home and abroad. Many of those crops, providing both sustenance and livelihoods, have been wiped out. “Obviously this will have an effect on the overall economic situation,” Bhutto-Zardari said.
Pakistan’s meteorological department said the country had received twice the usual monsoon rainfall but the southern provinces of Balochistan and Sindh had more than four times the average of the last three decades.
Much of Sindh’s farmland now resembles a vast inland lake around and north of the Indus River Delta. Upriver, the Indus, the source of 90 per cent of Pakistan’s water, is threatening to break its banks.
Large parts of the aid effort are focused around the city of Sukkur, where all eyes are trained on the fate of the Sukkur Barrage, a colonial-era sluice system that redistributes the waters of the Indus along 6,000 miles of canals. Years of negligence have silted up the system and much of the farmland it supplies resembles a vast inland lake. Military helicopter pilots have complained that the flooding is so extensive that they are struggling to find dry places to offload supplies.
Should the sluice system fail, hundreds of thousands more Pakistanis could be inundated. Aziz Soomro, the Sukkur Barrage supervisor, said that the main headway of water was expected to arrive in about a week’s time but expressed confidence that the 90-year-old sluice gates would cope.
In the northern areas, including the tourist destination of the Kaghan mountains, pilots are navigating treacherous conditions to try to pluck people off steep hills after rains caused massive mudslides, bringing down buildings and bridges. In one area a 150-room hotel crumbled into a torrent and was washed away.
