World Bank Pledges $900 Million for Pakistan Flood Aid as Damage Worsens

By Adi Narayan and Farhan Sharif - Aug 17, 2010 12:30 PM GMT+0400

Emergency relief to Pakistan is “trickling in” and must increase to help up to 20 million people displaced by the country’s worst-ever floods, an aid agency said.

Almost three weeks of flooding from the northwest to the southern province of Sindh has killed 1,600 people, displaced millions more, and destroyed homes, farms and bridges. Relief groups are coping with an area of 160,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles), almost the size of Uruguay.

“We have big stocks in the country, but getting them on the road to places that need them takes time,” Patrick Fuller, spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said by phone from Kuala Lumpur after spending 10 days in Pakistan. “At the moment, the funds are trickling in, not pouring in.”

The federation tomorrow will launch a new appeal to double the $16 million it has raised, he said. The World Bank yesterday pledged $900 million in assistance, while the United Nations has raised about a third of the $460 million it is seeking for emergency relief, the BBC reported today. Australia today increased its aid for Pakistan to A$35 million ($31.6 million).

Forecasters said more than two weeks without heavy rains is necessary for the risk of more flooding to be averted. The government yesterday warned of a new flood wave making its way south as well as more monsoons, exacerbating the country’s “worst natural disaster” since its creation in 1947.

Rivers ‘Running Over’

Pakistan’s river network, centered on the Indus that runs through the nation’s economic and farming heartland, will remain “sensitive” to a third wave of flooding until early September as the monsoon weather system plays out, said Ajmal Shad, senior director at the Floods Forecasting Division in Lahore.

“The next two weeks are very crucial, since our rivers are already running over burdened,” he said.

Almost 900,000 homes have been destroyed, Information Minister Qamaruz Zaman Kaira said yesterday. The World Bank estimates crop damage at $1 billion, while Pakistan’s farm minister said agricultural losses may top $3 billion as rivers swamp up to a fifth of the country’s land.

The disaster area “is so massive,” said Fuller, who visited villages in northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the flooding began late last month and where Taliban insurgents have been fighting Pakistani troops for over a year.

‘A Cyclone’

Some villages appear as if “a cyclone has ripped through,” he said. “People are sleeping out on the roadside, on embankments, on boons, wherever there is a bit of high ground.”

At the other end of the country, almost one million people living in and around the city of Jacobabad in Sindh province have been evacuated, local official Ziaul Islam said by phone yesterday.

“The floodwaters have destroyed 90 percent of the agricultural land, but not entered Jacobabad city,” he said.

Underscoring the need for urgent relief, the United Nations said as many as 3.5 million children are at risk from water- borne diseases, including dysentery. Cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E are also concerns, UN spokesman Maurizio Giuliano said in a text message.

One in 10 patients treated by Medecins Sans Frontieres’ eight mobile clinics in Pakistan had acute watery diarrhea, the medical aid group said. MSF teams have treated about 10,000 patients in total so far, the organization’s New York office said in a statement on its website.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said two days ago that the body will allocate a further $10 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund, bringing its contribution to $27 million since the crisis began more than two weeks ago.

The floods destroyed homes, cut communications and inundated sugar, cotton and rice crops. The disaster may cut Pakistan’s economic growth in half, Finance Secretary Salman Siddique said Aug. 13, with expansion falling as much as 2.5 percentage points short of a 4.5 percent target for the year ending June 30.

To contact the reporters on this story: Adi Narayan in Mumbai at anarayan8@bloomberg.net; Farhan Sharif in Karachi at fsharif2@bloomberg.net