Water, still everywhere

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Losing the battle of hearts and minds in post-flooding Pakistan.

It is almost seven months since Pakistan was ravaged by the largest flood in its history, beginning on 27 July 2010. While the Swat Valley and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are today well on their way to recovery, the real disaster is still happening far to the south. It is a catastrophe that has gone largely unnoticed, and could get worse.

The road ahead: Flooding in Dadu district of Sindh, October 2010.
Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

The majority of those affected by the disaster were farmers or unskilled labourers living near the poverty line. At the flood’s peak, it is said, a body of water the size of the United Kingdom was moving south. As it moved, by January it had destroyed or damaged beyond repair at least 1.8 million houses, according to the National Disaster Management Authority, in addition to over 2.2 million hectares of crops and more than 10,000 schools. At the height of the crisis, as many as 20 million people were directly affected; the flooding led to the deaths of 1961 people and the injuries of 2907.

Today, the riverine delta in lower Sindh remains flooded with large areas still awash and the land saturated. Flood-affected households have lost up to 40 percent of their livestock, and in some areas the entire poultry flock was wiped out. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the floods did destroy stockpiles of arms and munitions held by extremist groups, but small anti-personnel mines have found their way down into the river system. These could now remain active for decades.

And yet, the Pakistani government officially ended emergency relief operations on 31 January, much to the consternation of aid and relief agencies. Following the typical arc of coverage, the story has also largely dropped from national and international media. The American and British helicopters have gone, and aid agencies are reporting significant difficulty in funding ongoing programmes. By December 2010, the UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF, was already warning that if significant assistance did not arrive by the end of the year, some 1.4 million people, half of them children, would stop receiving clean drinking water from its workers. It didn’t and they aren’t. Overall, UNICEF says that it has received less than half – around USD 134 million – of what it has said it needs; other agencies report similar deficits.

Significant concern was initially expressed that flood-affected populations might be vulnerable to radicalisation by an influx of Islamic aid agencies, such as Dawa, as was seen in the aftermath of the Kashmir earthquake of 2005. Indeed, such groups were quickly and prominently on the ground delivering post-flooding emergency relief, and they have to be thanked for that. However, the religious organisations do not have the resources for the long job of rehabilitation, nor the capacity to repair infrastructure. As such, they have largely faded from the scene as the months have passed. Pakistan, it would seem, has not been able to pluck the heartstrings of the wider world.

An unsure world

In early February, the Sindh Department of Health issued a widely ignored report warning that 90,000 children under five had become significantly malnourished. Acute malnutrition rates of 21 to 23 percent are being observed among children in this age bracket in flood-affected areas throughout the province; if these children do not receive immediate assistance, they will be ten times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than a healthy child. Assuming they do survive, their mental and physical development will be slowed, and their income-earning potential as adults will be significantly reduced. Girls could suffer impaired fertility.

A further and also frequently ignored aspect, particularly on children and adolescents, has been the psychological impact of the flood. The ‘hearts and minds’ aspect of most disasters tends to be overlooked by observers near and far. The mental-health experts who have looked into the issue are finding that the post-flood period bodes ill for the future, particularly for those children who are already malnourished. According to the experts, children and adolescents are badly affected when their lives are disrupted – stripping away their daily rhythms, their sense of place and continuity.

Some of these children have lost relatives and breadwinners, their homes and schools, and their parents have lost their livelihood. In turn, this has led to a loss of their sense of security – they feel more insecure – and an erosion of social cohesion. A report by Save the Children indicates that up to 87 percent of children and adolescents sampled from flood-affected communities in Sindh have become more aggressive as a result of mental trauma. Up to 70 percent are said to be failing to adjust to their disrupted lives. Given that the majority of those affected by the floods in lower Punjab and Sindh were already living marginal lives where food insecurity was a daily feature, it is not difficult to see how this might feed social unrest.

The political response to the disaster has been ‘kneejerk’ with the absence of any kind of planned process. The civil infrastructure had been purposefully weakened by the government, which had abolished the system of elected nazims earlier, replacing these local ‘mayors’ with unelected civil servants. A replacement system had not been put in place at the time of the flooding – and this remains the situation today. There is thus a leadership deficit at the very grassroots, a situation exacerbated by the destruction of many of the local offices through which the civil administration operated. The only politician to emerge with credit in the immediate aftermath of the flooding was Shahbaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) in Punjab, whose efforts managed to look like they were more than a mere photo opportunity. The only other entity that came out well in the public’s eye is the military, whose response was widely seen as efficient and critical in stemming greater immediate problems. Of course, now that the real work of rehabilitation has begun, the generals can comfortably stay away from the issue.

Structural change

Of greater concern are the possible shifts in the feudal structures that have existed for centuries, and on which rural communities relied as their ‘social glue’. In much of riverine Sindh, the land has literally been destroyed. Nearly 85 percent of the affected population in the province remains displaced today, compared to about five percent in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Once they return home, these communities will have to rebuild their houses and resume their livelihoods – agriculture. But with the massive destruction of land and crops has come an imbalance in the traditional relationship between the poor agricultural workers and the feudal landlords. As such, while the winter planting season is already long lost, the spring season is now looking extremely doubtful. This will mean that returnees will not be able to get a crop of any sort harvested before October, if they are lucky. The displaced are also a heavily indebted category. While the size of individual debts might be relatively small, the means of repaying it (or the mark-up) has disappeared beneath the floodwaters.

In many instances, landlords are faring little better than their tenants. Widespread loss of ownership records is now certain to prompt a flood of disputes in coming years with the rich. The poor have lost land and houses, cattle and goats, and seen the 2010 cotton crop devastated. Some of the displaced are drifting towards the cities. If large numbers in an advantageous position move to Karachi, they are going to aggravate the already toxic ethnic tensions in the city, and put greater strain on its creaking infrastructure.

Economically, the floods are reported to have meant a loss of some PKR 855 billion (USD 10 billion), or 5.8 percent of the 2009-10 gross domestic product. Of this, PKR 429 billion was in agriculture alone, amounting to over 14 percent of this sector’s income. Sindh has incurred 44 percent of the total damage, Punjab 26 percent and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 12 percent, according to a government report. Overall economic growth is likely to suffer a significant deterioration, and public finances have been hit by the increase in flood-related expenditures. Federal development budgets (those disbursed to the provinces) have been slashed and are said to be due for further review. Inflation is going to remain high, and the already miniscule returns from direct taxation have been reduced to near invisibility.

Although difficult to gauge precisely, it is clear that the ruling Pakistan People’s Party has suffered a significant drop in its popularity, due to its perceived failure to act either swiftly or adequately to the developing catastrophe. With elections two years away, the party can no longer be assured of support in its Sindh heartland. Meanwhile, the fact that it was the Pakistan Army, rather than the country’s politicians, which rose to the flood challenge meant that the military machine has been able to restore much of its social capital affected during the years of military rule under Pervez Musharraf.

~ Chris Cork is an editorial consultant and columnist at The News. He has managed aid and development projects in Pakistan for 15 years.

Also see:

While the water recedes...by Iqbal Khattak

Forgotten souls by Shamim-ur-Rahman

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