IN PAKISTAN, the flood waters just keep on coming. While the stationary weather system that produced the extreme rainfall seems to have dissipated, the annual monsoon rains continue to fall. As 快猫短视频 went to press, a new wave of flood water was heading down the Indus river, with the populous southern province of Sindh .
With over 1400 people confirmed dead and millions affected, the immediate health consequences have been dire. But the biggest problem may be an escalating food shortage. According to a by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 3.2 million hectares of standing crops and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost, along with most food supplies stored in affected homes. These figures will only grow, compounded by the fact that Sindh is one of the country鈥檚 main agricultural areas.
The situation can be partly salvaged if the winter wheat crop is planted by September, but that depends on clearing the sediment dumped by the floods. 鈥淧akistan has the largest continuously managed irrigation system in the world,鈥� says of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now the system is almost certainly silted up. Clearing it will be a huge task, especially now that floods and landslides have knocked out many roads.
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鈥淚t will take a long time until the infrastructure is up and running,鈥� says economist of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria.
In the longer term, floods can flush salt out of the soil and deposit better topsoil, says , also at the IIASA, so in theory the country may end up more fertile than before. 鈥淏ut that鈥檚 a maybe,鈥� he warns. And of ISRIC 鈥� World Soil Information in Wageningen, the Netherlands, cautions that the sediment will contain the rubbish and pollution that the water has picked up on its way. 鈥淎ny positive impacts will probably be more than counterbalanced by other negative effects of the floods,鈥� he says.
