What happens when, over the course of a few short weeks, a country utterly loses the ability to feed itself?
The monsoons that began flooding Pakistan’s bread basket in late July – a geography roughly comparable to the spread from Paris to southern Italy – have caused the most colossal wipeout of a national food system in recent history.
As the staggering tally of lost land, food stuffs, seeds stocks, livestock and poultry continues, experts remain flummoxed over how to rebuild such a wholly destroyed system – there is no pre-existing road map for where to begin.
“They have to start from scratch or even below scratch,” said Luigi Damiani
With such an unprecedented scale of damage, what experts fear most is that, whatever path they choose, the effort will be ineffective. Before the floods sank one million hectares of agricultural land, drowned the nation’s poultry sector (six million birds were lost) and destabilized more than 14 million livestock, Pakistan was “food secure,” meaning it managed to feed itself, Mr. Damiani said.
Then, Pakistan was a net producer of wheat; farmers were in the habit of saving seeds for a handful of years. Although there wasn’t much money circulating in rural communities, many got by on subsistence agriculture. It was customary to borrow and trade with neighbours to meet extra needs.
“Savings” were held in the form of large animals, usually goats, cows or milk-producing buffalos. But when the flooding began, affecting more than 17 million people, entire herds – and several lifetimes’ worth of savings – were washed away.
“My five goats and one cow swept away before our eyes,” said Bhooral, a farmer and father of four who, like many in rural Pakistan, goes only by one name. The 40-year-old managed to coax one goat, a cow and a buffalo to follow the Datsun he hired to ferry his family to dry land in Hyderabad
Now, living alongside other flood victims at the austere Sabzi Mandi camp, a former vegetable market in the southern Pakistani city of Hyderabad, the family has taken to stretching their meals into portions of eight. The extra food – made with donated rice, high-energy biscuits and enriched wheat – is doled out to the family’s starving cow and goat.
“If [farmers] were able to keep their animals, they are now starving. They don’t know what to feed with,” Mr. Damiani said.
Figuring out how to feed and vaccinate the animals that families such as the Bhoorals have managed to keep alive has become a top priority for the FAO, which is responsible for co-ordinating all the non-government agriculture-related organizations on the ground. (Officials are also beginning to worry about the spread of disease among animals that have been crammed, along with their owners, into urban camps for the internally displaced.)
The other immediate priority, Mr. Damiani said, is to try to salvage what’s left of the winter planting season. Although rains have abated, water levels have been slow to recede, spiking worries over whether farmers – if they’re able to find their way back to their land – will be able to plant wheat seeds or another substitution crop in time to grow anything.
“If we don’t plant now, it means the next harvest for wheat will be April or May, 2012,” Mr. Damiani said. That would mean two guaranteed years of food instability for both people and their animals at time when the focus should be on rebuilding the country’s animal stocks.
“You cannot just produce six million new chicks,” Mr. Damiani said. “To re-establish the system, it will take time.”
Rebuilding the country’s capacity to feed itself is also critical for Pakistan’s long-term stability. Officials fear that if agriculture is no longer a viable means of subsistence, the country’s rural regions will be permanently abandoned and a mass population shift will take place into Pakistan’s already-crowded urban centres.
“Can you imagine the social cost of something like this? Mr. Damiani said. “Agriculture prevents all this and generates a little wealth in small communities.”
