Robert Birsel

Reuters

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 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 forced 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.

Masood Ahmad, 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 will 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 hectares of crops, some 14 percent of cultivated land, have been damaged or lost, the UN says. In the northwest, 71 percent of rice crops have been destroyed.

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

“I see always such organizations 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.

Mindful of criticism of the government, Premier Yusuf Raza Gilani said he had directed the federal Health Ministry “to take all measures necessary to prevent outbreaks of diseases.”

He will have some convincing to do.

“People prefer non-governmental organizations over government because they provide food and other relief items quickly,” said Nursrat Iqbal, a community elder in Nowshera.

“There’s little hassle. You’re not supposed to wait hours and hours for a bag of flour.” Gilani said the government had distributed 200 tons of medicines and supplies to 2.2 million people.

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