Pakistan needs billions to recover
Pakistan will need billions of dollars to recover from its worst
floods in history, the United Nations said Sunday.
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Evacuated flood victims crowd a naval boat in Sukkur, located in
Sindh province. Reuters |
The Government has struggled to cope with the scale of the disaster,
which has killed at least 1,500 people, prompting the international
community to help by donating tens of millions of dollars and providing
relief supplies.
But the UN special envoy for the disaster, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said
the need for foreign aid would be much greater going forward and could
be difficult to procure given the ongoing financial crisis around the
world.
The UN is still calculating specific figures, but Ripert said in an
interview with The Associated Press that 'the emergency phase will
require hundreds of millions of dollars and the recovery and
reconstruction part will require billions of dollars'.
Much of that money will be needed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the site of
the worst damage from floods that first hit two weeks ago after
extremely heavy monsoon rains. But as the floodwaters rushed south, it
also brought death and destruction to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh.
Late on Sunday, a magnitude-3.8 earthquake jolted Sindh, but no
damage was reported, said Qamaruz Zaman Chaudhry, the country's top
meteorological official. At least 1.4 million acres of crops were
destroyed in Punjab, said the UN. Many more crops were devastated in the
northwest.
"The flooding has caused massive damage to crops and also to the
reserve that people had at their houses," spokesman for the World Food
Program, which has provided food to more than 265,000 people in the
northwest, Amjad Jamal said.
"Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was a food insecure province even before the
floods, and a lot of areas are such that people can't afford even one
meal a day," said Jamal.
Masood Haider adds from New York:
The floods have affected over six million people, according to the
latest UN estimates and the estimate of the funds needed to meet
requirements of the victims could be revised upwards of $300 million, UN
officials said.
AFP |
