Recovery from floods to take Pakistan years: Zardari

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Khaleej Times - SUKKUR, Pakistan - Pakistan could take years to recover from the floods disaster, its president said, as crisis talks began with the IMF which predicted the catastrophe would have a “major and lasting” economic impact.

An official in the province of Sindh said on Tuesday that up to 600,000 people were now in danger from rising flood waters in the south, nearly a month into a calamity that has affected a third of the country and cast some 4 million from their homes.

“We are strengthening embankments but 500,000 to 600,000 people in low-lying areas are still in danger and we are trying to persuade them to leave their areas,” Sindh’s irrigation minister, Jam Saifullah Dherjo, told Reuters.

Flood victims are seething over what they say is their government’s sluggish response to the floods which have wiped out villages, bridges, roads, crops, livestock and livelihoods.

In Nowshera, northwest of Islamabad in one of the hardest hit areas, the main relief camp housed 3,300 people. Several people complained they were being denied relief goods by camp officials.

“We only get cooked food, nothing else. Everything else they receive from donors - blankets, water buckets, beds. They just store it,” said Sher Ghani, 48, a driver with a transport company whose house was destroyed in floods.

“To make it worse for us, thieves took away whatever was left in our former house,” said Ghani, cursing the government.

Pakistan faces the challenges of securing aid for relief efforts, ensuring militants do not exploit the catastrophe to gain recruits and devising ways to dull long-term economic pain.

In talks, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told General James Mattis, the new head of the U.S. military command overseeing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that public support could only be kept intact if the international community helps Pakistan provide relief to flood victims. “Any slackness in this context may provide an opportunity to the extremists to promote their destructive agendas by exploiting public miseries,” Gilani’s office quoted him say saying.

Masood Ahmed, director of the International Monetary Fund’s Middle East and Central Asia Department, told Reuters that while the catastrophe was still unfolding, it was clear the floods would have “a major and lasting impact” on an economy that was fragile before the floods struck.

Agriculture is a mainstay of the economy. At least 3.2 million ha (7.9 million acres) of crops, some 14 percent of cultivated land, have been damaged or lost, the U.N. says. In the northwest, 71 percent of rice crops have been destroyed.

Fragile, Now Flood-Hit, Economy

President Asif Ali Zardari expressed concern that Islamic militants would try to exploit the disorder.

“I see always such organisations and such people taking advantage of this human crisis,” Zardari said in an interview published in Britain’s Independent newspaper on Tuesday. “It is again a challenge to not let them take advantage of this human crisis.”

Zardari, who triggered criticism when he went ahead with visits to meet British and French leaders and when he spent time at a family property in France as the catastrophe unfolded, defended the government’s response.

“I have my own reasons for being where I was and at what time,” Zardari said, adding that “three years is the minimum” for Pakistan to rebuild, according to the newspaper.

The United Nations estimates at least 660,000 people have contracted acute diarrhoea, skin and respiratory diseases and warns of the spread of fatal scourges such as cholera.

Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh will join the IMF talks in Washington on Wednesday. He has said he wants the fund to ease restrictions on the $11 billion loan programme approved in 2008.

Ahmed said the options available to the Pakistanis are to adjust the current IMF programme to factor in fiscal pressures arising from the floods, or to opt for emergency funding provided by the IMF to countries hit by natural disasters.

Even before the floods, Pakistan’s economy was fragile. Growth, forecast at 4.5 percent this fiscal year, is now predicted at anything between zero to 3 percent.