This is the worst disaster in my lifetime and the AmeriKan MSM is moving on....
"Crisis in Pakistan is being compounded by loss of livestock; As animals die, nation’s agrarian economy suffers" by Karin Brulliard, Washington Post | August 31, 2010
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 is a local calamity — measured in milk shortages and scores of lost jobs — that is magnifying the threat of epidemics among hungry and weak survivors here.
At the national level, 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.
So expect FAMINE on the back-end of this catastrophe!
A month after monsoon rains caused flooding in the northern mountains, relief efforts were still in emergency mode. The Indus River, surging at 40 times its normal volume, breached levees near the southern city of Sujawal on Sunday. 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 gives a damn about the frikkin' war right now?
Can't we take a FEW MONTHS OFF to HELP PEOPLE?
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 9 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.
The scale of this disaster is really mind-bending and incomprehensible to me.
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 officials said. Some textile plants have shuttered and laid off workers.
Taliban recruiting line right over here.
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 UN 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....
And many poor Pakistanis were already starving.
Many of the displaced might never be able to return home, given the ruined landscapes, relief officials said....
(Blog editor stares at the sentence in astonished silence)
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 the 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.
Related: Flood of Photos From Pakistan
The UN’s agricultural agency said the flooding has killed at least 200,000 livestock, but that is just the beginning.More lives lost!
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.
The whole place has been a wipe out.
Survivors struggled for relief bags in Kot Addu, Pakistan, yesterday. Flooding has affected 17 million Pakistanis, and engulfed a fifth of the country. (Arif Ali/ AFP/ Getty Images)
--more--"
Also see: Boston Sunday Globe Censorship: Pakistan Flood Expanding
Thus only a photo I would have never seen had I not bought a printed paper the next day:
"AFTER THE DEVASTATION -- A Pakistani boy and his father rebuilt their flood-damaged house in Punjab Province, Pakistan, yesterday. Floodwaters started emptying into the Arabian Sea, but the challenges of delivering emergency aid to 8 million remained (Boston Globe September 1 2010)."
Related: Pakistan Flood Coverage Drying Up
It's dried up completely in my Boston Globe.
Also see:
"Troops fire on protesters in Kashmir, 3 killed
Government forces fired on protesters hurling stones at them in Indian Kashmir on Monday, killing three people and wounding at least 17 other demonstrators, police said.
For the last three months, the mostly Muslim Kashmir region has been roiled by demonstrations and clashes between protesters opposed to Indian rule and government forces. The deaths bring to 68 the number of people killed in the civil unrest.
Yeah, that coverage faded rather quickly, too.Hey, it's not like it is Jews being mowed down.
Only Muslims, right?
Mowed down by an ally no less.
