Pakistan needs financial help after ‘overwhelming’ floods: Bilawal

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan needs financial help to deal with “overwhelming” 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.

Unusually heavy 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 destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words, it is overwhelming,” said Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari in an interview with British wire service, adding many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out. “Obviously this will have an effect on the overall economic situation,” he said.

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

“Going forward, I would expect not only the IMF, but the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation,” he said. Bilawal 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.

Pakistan’s central bank had already flagged the record monsoon rainfall as a threat to economic output given its impact on agriculture. Pakistan would this week launch an appeal asking United Nations member states to contribute to relief efforts, Bilawal said, and the country needed to look at how it would handle the longer term impacts of climate change.

“In the next phase, when we look towards rehabilitation and reconstruction, we will have conversations not only with the IMF, but with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank,” he said.

He 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. “Despite the fact that 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, however we can, to live in this new environment,” he said.