The Pakistan Floods
Written by Laura Miller
19. Aug, 2010 
18 Comments
SubhanAllah. As of this writing, a quarter of all the land in Pakistan, from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa down to Sindh, has been flooded due to heavy monsoons. The death toll, at about 1,500, isn’t as high as that of other natural disasters, like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami – but the floods have affected some 20 million people. That means one out of every nine Pakistanis have been displaced by the floods, and 3.5 million children are at risk of contracting waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.
It boggles the mind. So many of those flood victims will be at risk of (involuntary) hunger this Ramadan, if they aren’t already affected by hunger and dying of it. The lethality of torrential floods is not like a quick gunshot to the head, as an earthquake would be; it’s like a metastasizing cancer, the deadliness slowly unfolding. The floods could well be a sign of impending climate change; observational evidence from the US Global Change Research Program indicates that warmer tropical sea surfaces correlate with more intense tropical storms. Even so, what will determine the severity of a natural event is not the event itself (even if the monsoons do get stronger overtime) but how well-prepared societies are, and the vulnerability of their constituents. And that is what has made the 2010 Pakistan floods particularly catastrophic.
For example, according to a January 2010 report from the Health Protection Agency (United Kingdom), the likelihood of an earthquake occurring in Japan, Southern Europe, and the western United States, is similar. But despite similarity in hazard, Japan and the western US have more seismically-retrofitted infrastructure in place, and Southern Europe has 10 fold the vulnerability of Japan, and 100 fold that of the western US (which could explain why the 6.3 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, in April 2009, left 65,000 people homeless). Even then, Italy and other countries of Southern Europe are not considered “developing.” One can only imagine the even greater vulnerability of poor tectonically-active countries like the Philippines.
Pakistan doesn’t have elaborate flood control like the Oosterschelde Storm Surge Barrier in the Netherlands. The low-lying Netherlands are at risk of floods, but after the North Sea Flood of 1953 killed about 2,400 people, Amsterdam undertook an ambitious project of constructing dams, dikes, and sluices along the Dutch coastline. Pakistan can’t afford such a project the way the Netherlands can, and it is plagued by political corruption. Furthermore, the situation in the countryside is not too different from that in many Latin American countries. Farmland ownership is concentrated in the hands of a minority of absentee landlords; governments typically support (or are in fact propped by) the landlord classes. It’s feudalistic; Pakistan didn’t carry out agrarian reform the way some of the “Asian Tigers” did (for example, after 1945 South Korea confiscated all land held by Japanese colonials, and Korean landowners had to give up most of their holdings). No wonder, then, that some ten million children of poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers in Pakistan are not in school, but working in brick kilns and manufacturing industries, while another twenty million are “employed” as bonded labor.
We can think of the Pakistan floods as the “final blow” to rural inequities that have been festering for decades. In some parts of the country, food prices are tripling because of damage to crops and road networks. And of course, it is the poor who will be the first to go hungry. Amartya Sen from Harvard University found that a shortage of food (i.e., damaged crops) disrupts everyone’s claim to food. Ideally, if food was shared or rationed out, starvation could be prevented. But what ends up happening during natural disasters is that wealthier farmers and merchants (those with more “claim”) hoard the wheat or rice crops and even profit off of it. There’s no reason why this couldn’t happen in Pakistan, if it isn’t already happening. And that is where the real tragedy lies.
Flickr photo credit: Shazwaz
Laura – thank you for bringing light to the situation in Pakistan!nnThe ending was so ironic given that the last article you wrote was about how “there is enough food on the planet”, yet instead in this situation there would be a shortage of food because those who are wealthier would hoard it.nnIts trully such a sad sad situation. Watching the live coverage of what people are going through one can see how truly demoralized and hopeless the people have become. They have no faith in their corrupt government to help them, they have no faith in their competitive neighbors to lend them a hand, man of them have lost their families and are so close to loosing themselves……nnMay Allah (SWT) help ease their suffering, provide them with speedy relief and protect them from any further harm. (ameen)
Laura – thank you for bringing light to the situation in Pakistan!nnThe ending was so ironic given that the last article you wrote was about how “there is enough food on the planet”, yet instead in this situation there would be a shortage of food because those who are wealthier would hoard it.nnIts trully such a sad sad situation. Watching the live coverage of what people are going through one can see how truly demoralized and hopeless the people have become. They have no faith in their corrupt government to help them, they have no faith in their competitive neighbors to lend them a hand, man of them have lost their families and are so close to loosing themselves……nnMay Allah (SWT) help ease their suffering, provide them with speedy relief and protect them from any further harm. (ameen)
Laura – thank you for bringing light to the situation in Pakistan!nnThe ending was so ironic given that the last article you wrote was about how “there is enough food on the planet”, yet instead in this situation there would be a shortage of food because those who are wealthier would hoard it.nnIts trully such a sad sad situation. Watching the live coverage of what people are going through one can see how truly demoralized and hopeless the people have become. They have no faith in their corrupt government to help them, they have no faith in their competitive neighbors to lend them a hand, man of them have lost their families and are so close to loosing themselves……nnMay Allah (SWT) help ease their suffering, provide them with speedy relief and protect them from any further harm. (ameen)
Laura – thank you for bringing light to the situation in Pakistan!nnThe ending was so ironic given that the last article you wrote was about how “there is enough food on the planet”, yet instead in this situation there would be a shortage of food because those who are wealthier would hoard it.nnIts trully such a sad sad situation. Watching the live coverage of what people are going through one can see how truly demoralized and hopeless the people have become. They have no faith in their corrupt government to help them, they have no faith in their competitive neighbors to lend them a hand, man of them have lost their families and are so close to loosing themselves……nnMay Allah (SWT) help ease their suffering, provide them with speedy relief and protect them from any further harm. (ameen)
Laura – thank you for bringing light to the situation in Pakistan!nnThe ending was so ironic given that the last article you wrote was about how “there is enough food on the planet”, yet instead in this situation there would be a shortage of food because those who are wealthier would hoard it.nnIts trully such a sad sad situation. Watching the live coverage of what people are going through one can see how truly demoralized and hopeless the people have become. They have no faith in their corrupt government to help them, they have no faith in their competitive neighbors to lend them a hand, man of them have lost their families and are so close to loosing themselves……nnMay Allah (SWT) help ease their suffering, provide them with speedy relief and protect them from any further harm. (ameen)
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.
Laura,thank for sharing such an informative article.nI love the way you ended the post.The tragedy of the floods in Pakistan is multiplied by the corruption of the government.I guess if we all knew that the aid that we are sending will reach the most needy. We would have some sense of relief knowing that the needy are being helped.nUnfortunately,there is no guarantee of that happening and that is what breaks my heart about the tragedy.