The big flood in Pakistan
- August 18th, 2010
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The floods have killed about 1,500 people and inundated 1.7 million acres (700,000 hectares) of wheat, sugar cane and rice. Food prices have risen sharply, wholesale camera bag is to protect your camera, you should have one.
Prepare a rechargeable battery on your porcket, it can help you when needed, if you are a environmentalist, you should choose Ni-Mh Rechargeable Battery. “It’s all been destroyed. I’ll get nothing this year,” said wheat farmer Zubair Ahmed in hard-hit Sindh province. “Nobody cares in the government. We’re stranded, and they don’t even pay attention to us.”
Aid distribution in Sindh was chaotic and patchy.
“We have never dealt with a calamity of this magnitude,” said Faisal Edhi, who works for Pakistan’s largest private welfare organization, the Edhi Foundation. “We’re trying to make it, but I don’t think we’ve been able to help 20 percent of the people we want to.”
In the town of Shikarpur, about 100 people mobbed two trucks that were dropping off food. People climbed the side of the truck to grab supplies, forcing relief workers to whip them with lengths of rope to keep them away.
Mir Hassan, an elderly flood victim, held out his empty hands after the trucks went through.
“I got nothing,” he said, complaining that people who were unaffected by the floods were taking the aid.
In the northwest, where the floods began, provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said the irrigation system needed to be rebuilt urgently to revive the farming sector.
“If immediate steps are not taken, we fear a famine,” he said. “The farmers have lost everything: their crops, their machines, their houses, their seeds.”
U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said Washington had committed at least $87 million in aid and is expected to give more in the coming days. More U.S. helicopters were likely to join the 19 already dispatched to help ferry stranded Pakistanis and deliver food and other items, U.S. officials said.
Patterson said it was too soon to understand what impact the disaster would have on the Taliban and al-Qaida-led insurgency on Pakistani soil. But she played down concerns that Islamist militants were winning flood victims’ support through their own relief activities.
“To be blunt, I think these stories about extremist organizations being the only players out there are greatly exaggerated,” Patterson told a news conference in Islamabad.
In a reminder of the militant threat, police said they had arrested two suicide bombers on the outskirts of the main northwestern city of Peshawar. They were wearing jackets of explosives and were intending to attack targets in the city, said police officer Meera Jan.
