Pakistan orders evacuation of town as flood spreads

Pakistan has ordered the evacuation of a southern town after the swollen Indus river broke its banks, nearly a month after devastating floods first struck, an official said on Friday.

Floodwaters are beginning to recede across most of the country as the water flows down the Indus, but because of high tides in the Arabian Sea, they still pose a threat to towns such as Thatta, 70 km (45 miles) east of Karachi, in the river delta.





The floods have killed almost 1,600 people, forced about six million from their homes and raised the danger of epidemics with the lack of fresh food and clean water.

“There was another breach last night which is very close to Thatta and the evacuation has been ordered for the whole city,” Riaz Ahmed Soomro, relief commissioner in the southern province of Sindh, told Reuters.

Many people from outlying areas had taken refuge in Thatta, which normally has a population of about 300,000, and now had to move again, he said. There is no threat to the southern business hub of Karachi.

“They’ve now had double displacement. People are moving to Karachi, Hyderabad and Badin districts,” Soomro said.

Many people had already left the town but tens of thousands were left and the government was laying on transport to get them out, he said.

“Boats, buses, helicopters, everything is being used to evacuate people. The army, navy, everyone is involved in rescuing the people,” he said.

The floods, which began after torrential monsoon downpours over the upper Indus basin, are Pakistan’s worst ever natural disaster in terms of the amount of damage and the number of people affected.

Even before the floods, Pakistan’s economy was fragile. Growth, forecast at 4.5 per cent this fiscal year, is now predicted at anything between zero to 3 per cent.

The floods have damaged at least 3.2 million hectares (7.9 million acres) — about 14 per cent of Pakistan’s entire cultivated land — according to the United Nation’s food agency. The total cost in crop damage is believed to be about 245 billion rupees (RM16.4 billion.)

Damage to crops

Underlining the damage to the economy, and the fear of food shortages, Food Ministry officials said the government was likely to cancel plans to export 2 million tonnes of surplus wheat because of the floods.

Pakistan, Asia’s third largest wheat producer, said in April it would export 2 million tonnes of wheat after a bumper crop of 23.86 million tonnes in 2009/10, and a carryover of 4.2 million tonnes from the previous crop.

The floods have damaged up to 600,000 tonnes of stored wheat, according to initial estimates, and a Food Ministry official said on Thursday another 125,000 tonnes of wheat in government stores had been washed away.

The rice crop has also been damaged, especially in the rice-belt of northern Sindh province, with 1.6 million tonnes of paddy lost.

But a spokesman for the UN World Food Programme said the agency was able to buy wheat in Pakistan for flood victims as stocks were still available.

Concerns have also grown that Islamist charities, some with links to militants, had increased their involvement in the flood relief effort.

“There are certainly clear indications that the insurgents and affiliated groups are trying to use the flood and the relief from the flood to try to gain support for their broader effort of being able to control large parts of Pakistan,” a US official said in Washington.