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https://www.nationthailand.com/international/international-news/40019463

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Pakistan needs financial help to deal with “devastating” floods, its foreign minister said on Sunday, adding that he hoped financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund would take the economic fallout into account.

Weighty monsoon rains have caused devastating floods in both the north and south of the country, affecting more than 30 million people and killing more than 1,000. 

“I haven’t seen the destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words,” said Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari in an interview with Reuters, adding many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out.

Pakistan would this week launch an appeal asking United Nations member states to contribute to relief efforts, Bhutto-Zardari said, and the country needed to look at how it would handle the longer-term impacts of climate change.

Bhutto-Zardari said after relief efforts, the country would have to look at how to develop infrastructure that was more resistant to both floods and droughts and address the huge changes faced by the agriculture sector.

The foreign minister said that although Pakistan contributes “negligible amounts to the overall carbon footprint … we are devastated by climate disasters such as these time and time again, and we have to adapt within our limited resources, in whatever way we can, to live in this new environment.”

The South Asian nation was already in an economic crisis, facing high inflation, a depreciating currency, and a current account deficit.

The IMF board will decide this week on whether to release $1.2 billion as part of the seventh and eighth tranches of Pakistan’s bailout program, which it entered in 2019.

Bhutto-Zardari said the board was expected to approve the release given an agreement between Pakistani officials and IMF staff had already been reached. He hoped in the coming months the IMF would recognize the impact of the floods.

Bhutto-Zardari, the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, said the economic impact was still being assessed, but that some estimates had put it at $4 billion. Given the impact on infrastructure and people’s livelihoods, he said he expected the total figure would be much higher.

Published : August 29, 2022

By : Reuters