It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the floods in Pakistan. Water has engulfed a third of the country, destroyed the homes of 33 million people and impacted more than one in five Pakistanis. It’s a devastating example of climate carnage, with more rain on the horizon.
But even if the rain stopped and the waters receded, Pakistan’s crisis has only just begun. An entire generation risks missing out on schooling; families are grappling with lost homes, farms and income. And water-borne diseases, famine, and exploitation are fuelling the humanitarian and climate crisis.
Immediate urgency on the ground
Save the Children Pakistan director Muhammad Khuram Gondal has spent the past few days providing aid in Sindh in the south of Pakistan. The scenes on the ground, he tells Crikey, are devastating.
“Still the water is there and it’s not going anywhere. Yesterday, it rained in Karachi and in the northern areas of Pakistan as well and in the next 10 days we will be receiving more and more water,” he said. This year, the country has received 2.9 times more rain than the national 30-year average.
Gondal, along with around 80 staff, has been deployed across the country — first delivering aid following the droughts and heatwave and now providing emergency flood assistance.
A key concern is drinking water: rivers have burst and become contaminated with fertiliser and sewage, while wells are underwater. Locals are relying on bottled water to be delivered, but Gondal said the floods are so vast and waters so high that humanitarian organisations haven’t been able to reach many impacted villages.
“We are short in number and far-flung areas take a while to reach for assistance, so it’s very hard to reach them every single time with water supplies,” he said.
On high ground, makeshift camps have been established housing thousands of people in each. Disease has started to spread: diarrhoea, cholera, dengue fever, malaria, polio and COVID-19 are just some of the outbreaks the United Nations has recorded.
A famine looming
The world is already facing a food crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with millions of tonnes of grain trapped in the country, farms destroyed and the harvesting season interrupted. Food prices skyrocketed since the invasion began, causing shortages across Syria, Yemen and Nigeria.
Pakistan is also among the world’s top 10 producers of wheat, cotton, sugarcane, mango, dates, kinnow (a citrus fruit similar to oranges) and rice. In Sindh, 90% of crops have been wiped out, with more than 1 million livestock lost so far.
Even when the waters eventually recede, there’ll be no bouncing back: fertile soil has been washed away and contaminated, with fungus spreading across farmland. Agriculture is the backbone of the country’s economy, employing more than 36% of the workforce.
“We’d be at least losing a couple of cycles of cultivation. With the kind of population we have in Pakistan, I think the food shortages would be huge — a famine is anticipated very early on,” Gondal said.
Malnutrition is already a major issue: two-thirds of children under five are anemic, and more than half are deficient in vitamin A.
A generation lost
An estimated 800,000 of those impacted are pregnant women, with some giving birth in makeshift tents or on rooftops. Despite improving infant mortality rates, as of 2020, the under-five mortality rate was 65 per 1000 live births while the maternal mortality rate is 140 deaths per 100,000 live births. Mobile maternal clinics have been set up, but they’re already running overcapacity, with a shortage of medical supplies.
Nearly half of those impacted are children. “There are 16 million children who have lost everything and anything that was dear to them,” Gondal said.
“Apart from the clothes on their backs, they have nothing — not even shoes.”
Gondal said around 18,000 schools have been destroyed and that while Save the Children has established learning centres in camps, it’s an interim arrangement.
“We don’t know how fast we can be with setting up a school structure, how fast we can be with making sure that we don’t lose generation [who] loses their studies,” he said.
Child marriages were another concern: without resources, families are more likely to marry their children off earlier for a dowry or to cut down on costs, Gondal said. Nearly one in five women are married before the age of 18.
“Exploitation and abuses happen in these settings,” he said, adding getting kids into school and finding work for locals would be crucial in the coming months.
“The poverty is going to multiply if we can’t get the basics of a meal a day, and people into labour.”
The region inundated is called the punj- ab (5 waters) for a reason, 5 major rivers and their tributaries traverse it, fed by the spring melt on the Karakoram (western Himalayan) ranges.
Harappa & Mohenjo-Daro flourished 5,000yrs ago and were obliterated from human memory for the same reason as the current situation, an hydraulic society based on irrigation which was over successful in denuding the foothills and plains of tree cover so that water flows too rapidly rather than slowly heldback long enough to soak into the soil.
Thank you for this info, most interesting. Stripping the trees also leads to most of the landslides we hear about too.
The people of Pakistan have just received a massive wake-up call. There is a good chance that an emergent willingness to change will allow the entire country to ditch conservative practices in favour of drastic adaption. We should watch with keen interest. Around the world other countries will receive a similar wake-up call. We could be next.
Water has engulfed a third of the country, This is still reported, but it has been debunked:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001brmm
I haven’t got 28 minutes to listen to that. Could you summarize?
It queried why “a third” was at odds with satellite data. Asked the relevant Pakistani minister, who admitted she’d meant a third of Pakistan’s districts were affected by flooding.
I see. One third of districts affected is quite different to one third of the total land area. Thanks for clarifying, Woopwoop.
Maybe the BBC should actually investigate a number of their own claims on other news stories first. The devastation and the number of people impacted is overwhelming no matter what is reported.
More whataboutery. Facts are important. Exaggeration destroys trust.
Those that continually claim “whataboutery” do so only because it shows the level of their own hypocrisy and the basis of their so-called “facts”. One article by the Bullshyte Broadcasting Commission does not debunk anything.
Here’s an article with an actual map. Looks like pretty close to 30% to me. But that’s what you get for trusting anything the BBC says.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/31/pakistan-floods-photos-videos-maps/
Thanks, but I’m with the BBC on this. The satellite map you link to looks much less than 30% (in blue) to me.
We should tell them to stop being wet.
The Pakistani people deserve and need support. The governments of Pakistan and its provinces do not. Their poor decision making and corrupt governance has helped build the conditions that have amplified the impact of extreme rainfall and resultant flooding. They have a history of mismanaging relief and reconstruction efforts.
Practically this means that funds and support should go through NGOs and charities, and not through the hands of government – either ministers, senior officials or their ministries/departments/agencies.
Anyone who thinks this is harsh should look at the history of disasters and the following relief efforts in Pakistan.
I’m wondering if your comments refer to Imran Khan’s government, or other government/s.
Which government/s are you talking about?
What period/s are you saying we should research?
Could you provide a summary or links to make it a bit simpler to follow what you are alluding to?
My psychiatrist, a Pakistani, told me that 90% of the country’s money is spent on the army. Just saying.
He is exaggerating a bit. It is ‘only’ around 40% of the national budget. On top of that the military maintains its own industrial complex making everything up to fighter jets.
I am referring to virtually any past major disaster. However the problems are significant and documented since the 1990s. Major floods in recent times were in 1992 and 2010. The 2010 ones were massive as a result of monsoon rainfall with possibly a higher death toll than the current floods.
The 2010 floods are documented reasonably well and in rather gentle language on Wikipedia. You will see references to slow and incompetent response by government, diversion of flood waters away from the land of the wealthy to those of the poor, hijacking of relief supplies and diversion/theft of funds.
I worked in Pakistan for 5 years finishing end 2018. At that time there was still criticism that funds donated for relief of the 2010 floods had not all been spent (at least officially). All of this predates Imran Khan’s government, but the system stays the same no matter who is in government.
Flood tolls are made worse by poverty because people with no land farm and live inside the banks of the rivers which normally run at a fairly low level due to the number of dams. The poor don’t tend to get warnings of floods.