KARACHI: Chairman of the Pakistan Businesses Forum’s (PBF) Sindh Chapter Mir Murad Ali Talpur has urged business community to come forward for the help of flood victims of Sindh and Balochistan.
“We can’t put this crisis alone on the shoulders of the government,” he said. He said that not only 1.5 million houses have been damaged in Sindh so far after heavy rains and urban flooding but it also completely destroyed the agriculture & agriculture related population; cotton is almost 90-100 percent damaged.
All vegetables specially onion which is major crop of Sindh is completely destroyed, Sindh not only produce onion for Pakistan but majority of onion export is from Sindh.
The rural economy is badly hit, roads are under water. Thousands of families are stranded and homeless and the rains have caused billions of rupees and property damage to the agricultural sector of Sindh. “Now concerted and well-coordinated efforts are required to deal with this climate emergency that our country faces at present”.
He also said estimates of losses suggest the country will return to the international market to make heavy imports of the cotton this year to run textile mills, which earn around 60 percent of the total export proceeds of the country.
Talpur projected that the country would barely produce 5 to 6 million bales of cotton this year compared to the pre-rainfall estimate of 9 million bales.
“Pakistan has to import around 8 million bales to meet textile mills’ demand this year,” he anticipated.
Currently, it was the cotton-picking season in Sindh, which provides an opportunity for livelihood to thousands of women and men, but due to the crop destruction, they could not find employment.
Murad Talpur further briefed that millions of farmers and labourers in Sindh have been pushed into poverty by the rains, but the government has not announced any assistance so far.
The provincial government should declare the entire Sindh as flood/ disaster affected and provide financial assistance to them under livestock and housing, immediately providing them with tents, mosquito nets, mosquito spray, food and drink equipment, digging drains and ensuring drainage of water from villages and crops.
We also demanded from National Bank of Pakistan, ZTBL and Sindh Bank to write off all agriculture loans in the province of Sindh and Balochistan on immediately bases for the 2021-2022 year.
PBF Vice Chairman Sindh, Syed Faheem Ali Shah said right now we are in 7th spell of a torrential monsoon that has left thousands homeless, 830 dead and 1348 injured. From Balochistan, the monsoon system has moved to Sindh where 30 districts are under water.
The magnitude of it can be assessed from the fact that it has rained more than 395 percent in Sindh and 379 percent in Balochistan above the average rainfall. It is a climate catastrophe of epic scale, bringing in its wake the humanitarian crisis that could well match the magnitude of the big flood that was witnessed in 2010.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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