Livestock losses from floods add to catastrophe in Pakistan

By Karin Brulliard
Sunday, August 29, 2010; 8:20 PM

MOHIB BANDA, PAKISTAN - Many of the people in this northwestern village are back at their mud-caked plots. Many of their strapping black buffaloes are not, having been washed away by the floods still displacing millions of people in the country's south.

The deaths of those animals - and the threat of epidemics among the hungry and weak that survived - has left behind a constellation of calamity. At the local level, it is measured in milk shortages and scores of lost jobs. Nationwide, the loss of livestock is part of a widescale drowning of the agricultural economy that feeds Pakistan, employs half its population and sustains its crucial textile export industry.

A month after monsoon rains caused flooding in the northern mountains, relief efforts were still in emergency mode. On Sunday, the Indus River, surging at 40 times its normal volume, breached levees near the southern city of Sujawal. Evidence is growing that the river's path of destruction has stunted, if not annihilated, social and economic systems across Pakistan.

The effects, from increased hunger to obliterated schools, are likely to force Pakistan and the United States - which last fall earmarked billions of dollars in aid to build up Pakistan's civilian government - to retool their development plans. The crisis could ignite unrest and imperil the army's fight against Islamist insurgents, who carried out three deadly bombings and threatened foreign aid workers this week.

Unlike the deadly jolt of the 2005 earthquake that previously ranked as Pakistan's gravest natural disaster, the flooding metastasized like a cancer, submerging an area nearly as large as Florida. With much of the south still underwater, assessing the damage remains guesswork.

But there is little doubt the losses are colossal. The government says 1.2 million houses, 10,000 schools, 35 bridges and nine percent of the national highway system have been damaged or destroyed. Even as emergency workers in the northern mountains build temporary bridges, landslides smother more roads.

Particularly unique to this disaster is the extensive agricultural ruin. With as much as 20 percent of farmland inundated, a lot of sugarcane was probably lost to root damage, and a quarter of this year's cotton - which accounts for 60 percent of Pakistan's exports - is destroyed, agricultural experts said. Some textile plants have shuttered and laid off workers.

The northern areas that are drying out may be able to manage the October wheat planting, but only if the soil proves resilient, and only if families do not first use all their seed as food, said Luigi Daimani of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. The wheat season in the flooded fields of southern Sindh province is in jeopardy, he said, meaning there might be no harvest until summer 2012, and the nation would have less for making bread.

"If you lose this season, it would be dramatic, dramatic," Daimani said.

The floods killed about 1,600 people. More than 17 million have been affected, nearly 5 million of whom lack shelter, officials said. At least 800,000 were still stranded in isolated areas this week, the U.N. reported.

Many of the displaced might never be able to return home, given the ruined landscapes, relief officials said.

"In a quick onset disaster, you bury the dead, and then you start working with the living," said Bill Berger, the disaster assistance response team leader for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In Pakistan, he said, the living amount to millions of victims who will need support for the foreseeable future.

Some who moved tugged along a lone cow or buffalo, the life savings for many in Pakistan's largely poor population of 170 million. This week, cattle shared space with humans at makeshift camps on roadsides in northwest and along rushing canals in the south. Refugees scavenged for grasses to feed the animals, some bony and afflicted with bacterial diseases and pneumonia.

The U.N.'s agricultural agency said the flooding has killed at least 200,000 livestock, but that is likely a drop in the bucket. In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province alone, the government says nearly that many large animals were wiped out, and those that remain have lost half their "production capacity" to illness and stress. Feed was destroyed, milking equipment was damaged and barns collapsed.

"I'll have to cut down some 60 percent of jobs. . . there will be less raw material this year," said Khawaja Usman, owner of a leather factory and vice president of the chamber of commerce and industry in the Punjab Province city of Multan.

In Mohib Banda, 300 cattle at a military-run dairy farm drowned, and some of their putrid carcasses lie covered in flies in the mud. In a nearby village, dairy farmer Arshed Ali lost 100 cattle to the Indus River. He managed to recover 20 stragglers.

"Our business is at a standstill," Ali, 38, said. "We have been brought to zero."

Shamsul Huda, a widow about 50 years old, grasped her five children when the waters came. She had no spare hand to lead her two buffalos, so she left them to the current. Now there is no milk, and no profit from selling milk or buffalo dung, which is used for fuel.

Huda said she wept recently at the sight of a buffalo. Women cannot work as farm laborers, so she said the only future she envisions is with another buffalo. The problem is the impossible $750 price.

"It is the only way to survive," Huda said. "What if I can't get another buffalo? I can't say anything. I don't have any answer to that."

Among the unending appeals of aid agencies - for helicopters, for clean water - the FAO called recently for money for grain and vaccines for livestock, to help restore peasants' livelihoods.

But that restoration is certain to be a grand project: U.S. and U.N. officials talk of the need for a massive cash-for-work program, with the destitute cleaning canals and replanting trees. It will require far more financial help - in donations and loans - than the $815 million given or pledged as emergency flood aid, officials said.

"This has caused not just a humanitarian crisis, but as you ride along the roadside and see the destruction of agriculture and the death of livestock, one recognizes that this also is a tremendous economic and social catastrophe," Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. AID, told reporters during a visit to the city of Sukkur this week.

Economic analysts predict Pakistan's economic growth could plummet from about 4 percent last year. One finance ministry official told the Reuters news agency that inflation could hit 25 percent, up from about 13 percent before the flood. In Mohib Banda, residents said milk prices have already shot up 50 percent.

Sher Mohammad, director of the provincial livestock department, said officials are now focused on saving the cattle that remains. Veterinarians are running dozens of emergency medical camps, helping stave off epidemics. But feed is running out, and he said he fears an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, for which the nation has little vaccine.

With the approach of Eid, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, Mohammad said he had one request for the public: Just this year, resist the tradition of slaughtering an animal.

Special Correspondents Haq Nawaz Khan and Mohammed Rizwan contributed to this report.