Pakistan faces year of crisis
07.09.2010 10:52 "Agro Perspectiva" (Kyiv) —
A massive, immediate programme is needed to revive farming communities in flood-stricken areas of Pakistan, a group of 36 United Nations agencies and non-governmental organisations said yesterday.
The groups, speaking under the aegis of the Agriculture Cluster in Pakistan, said yesterday that 80 per cent of the 18 million people the UN says have been affected by the floods depend on farming for their livelihoods.
«The devastating monsoon floods have caused damages of unprecedented scale to agriculture and families that rely on the sector as a primary or sole source of food and/or income,» said the report, which was based on surveys conducted from August 9 to August 27 in 39 of the 79 flood-affected districts.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned on Friday that failure to address the disaster afflicting Pakistan’s agricultural sector could lead to a year of food shortages with severe repercussions across areas of the country not affected by the floods.
The Pakistani government has said 20 per cent of the country’s arable land has been damaged by the floods.
The floods finally flowed out of the Indus River into the Arabian Sea at the weekend and the Indus’s flow is now back to normal.
About 1.31 million hectares of crops have been destroyed, about half of that in central Punjab province, according to the report.
Most of the affected area is subsistence farms on five hectares or less.
he floods inflicted a double whammy on already impoverished villagers by killing 274,000 heads of livestock and 459,000 poultry — key sources of income for subsistence farmers and the only source for peasants who live on rented accommodation and graze their animals on non-arable land, such as hillsides and semi-desert plains
A further 14.33 million head of livestock, more than half of them in southern Sindh province, are under threat and need supplies of feed, vaccines and veterinary care and shelters, the report said.
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