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	One year on, Pakistan’s flood survivors need continued support by FAO, ECHO & agencies   The floods that struck Pakistan starting in July 2010 represented one of the most devastating natural disasters of our times, submerging almost one-fifth of the country - an area the size of Greece - killing 2000 people, affecting 20 million and destroying 1.6 million homes.   Damage to agriculture - the basic livelihood for 80 percent of the affected population - was estimated at more than $5.1 billion, including the loss of over two million hectares of crops. The devastated area included the breadbasket province of Punjab and much of Pakistan"s most fertile land.   The disaster struck at a crucial point in the agricultural calendar-- just before the harvest of spring-planted crops and within weeks of the critical winter wheat planting season. Livestock surviving the floodwaters lacked feed, veterinary support and shelter. With existing and future sources of food and income washed away, humanitarian aides raced against time to prevent a domino effect.   Floods Response Programme   A year later, those efforts have proven successful. Today, thanks to FAO interventions under the international Floods Response Programme some 900 000 smallholder households - more than seven million people - are back on their feet again.   FAO"s efforts focussed as a matter of priority on winter planting of wheat and vegetables and on spring planting of maize and rice as well as vegetables. Support was provided to preserve vital livestock resources and on-farm irrigation systems were repaired.   Almost half a million households were provided with wheat and vegetable crop packages. They yielded 650 000 tonnes of wheat - twice as much as traditional seeds and enough to feed more than four million people for at least six months. In addition, the average family sold almost a third of their harvest, generating $116 of much needed cash income. From the onset of the floods, more than 200 organizations joined efforts through the Agriculture Cluster, led by FAO, to respond to immediate and critical challenges with the support of the donor community.   Other interventions included assistance to women to grow fresh, nutritious food in their own kitchen vegetable gardens. FAO provided individual families with vegetable kits, each of which yielded an average 500 kg of vegetables.   This bridged the gap before the wheat harvest in late spring and surplus production sold on the local market providing valuable income which families used to meet other basic needs.   Livestock support   Over 290 000 families received support from FAO for their livestock - an area in which women play a crucial role. This helped to keep over one million animals alive and healthy during the 2010/2011 winter until green fodder became available.   Urgent support still needed to restore rural livelihoods. Despite the above successes, much remains to be done to restore rural livelihoods and to significantly reduce vulnerability, improve food production and income generation, and increase the resilience of rural communities to future shocks.   July 2011   One year on Pakistani flood. (ECHO Regional Information Office, South Asia).   A year after Pakistan’s worst floods in memory, people are still picking up the pieces of their lives, trying to rebuild their homes, incomes, assets and livestock – for many the journey is a long one as recurrent floods erode their efforts.   The European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) says “there are still many ongoing humanitarian needs and areas are being flooded again”.   David Sevcik, ECHO’s Head of Office in Islamabad says “while we have been able to help many, there are many who are only just receiving assistance and people we have not been able to reach.”   Janomai has lived in Nari Shomali, in DG Khan District’s Taunsa area, all her life. Ever since she was a child, Janomai remembers floods, but none as big as last year’s.   “Every year the water comes; children, youngsters and the able-bodied run away. It is the old and infirm who remain tortured by the heat and fear. What else can be done?” laments Janomai, adding: “We have not emerged from last year’s flood.”   This year’s monsoon is early; already land is flooded. “Before the floods in 2010, we used to sit there,” said Bilal Hussein, a labourer from Morjanghi village in Taunsa, pointing to a large area with submerged trees. “It was a dry place, there was no water. Now the flood has come, the water here is standing. The water will come even higher; it will come up to the wall (his shoulder height).”   For Sajid Hamzewallah and his family, it was difficult to decide whether to plant anything this season, because last year’s devastating floods took their rice and sugar cane crops, their home and their livestock.   The 20-year-old had never experienced floods in his village in the Kotadu area in Muzaffargarh, southern Punjab, before the massive deluge last year. An elder of the village, Hameed Hussein, explains that the last floods they saw in this area were well over two decades ago.   “The fields were covered in sand and silt; we had to clean up the area and with help from international organisations, we are now able to plant rice,” said Sajid as he scattered rice seedlings across the paddy.   “We feel very helpless; even now all this work could get swept away any day, but we live in hope.”   As tenant farmers, Sajid and his family received some help from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with tents and materials to rebuild their homes. They lost cattle and goats that were swept away with the flood waters. “We still had to pay the landowner for renting his field,” adds Sajid. “As a tenant family, we lost over 300,000 Pakistani rupees (€2,400) in goods and income in that flood.”   “This year we are idle. We have not planted anything – it is going to be a tough season for us without our crops and no income,” said Bashir Ahmed, a farmer in Morjanghi. In Taunsa area, most farmers have not planted rice, cotton or sugar cane this season, for fear of loss.   “Last year, the NGOs gave us a chance to work, and gave us cash to clean our village and build protective banks. With this we were able to eat and rebuild our lives,” added Bashir.   At their height the 2010 covered roughly a fifth of the country. Around 2,000 people died and 20 million were affected.   “The humanitarian spotlight must be kept on Pakistan because independent and impartial aid delivery will help those in need whose resilience has been depleted and must not be tested further,” added ECHO’s Sevcik.   July 2011   Many older people"s basic needs remain unmet. (HelpAge International)   It is one year since the devastating flooding in Pakistan which affected 20 million people. Even now though, the country is struggling to recover and the monsoon season is fast approaching.   Although relief efforts are ongoing, they still haven"t reached many remote villages. Noor Ul Hadi, 55 from Nowshera, is the president of his older people"s association, which HelpAge set up to support older people after the floods.   He says: "After the floods, our lives were miserable. People were homeless and with such huge damage to our livelihoods, people became helpless. NGOs have provided support, financial assistance and rehabilitation activities.   "But the process of reconstruction is very slow. Many people"s basic needs haven"t been met. People are suffering, health and nutrition are the biggest concerns."   Malnutrition is also a major issue in Sindh and Punjab provinces which are poorer than many other areas.   "As the floods disrupted the harvest process and destroyed crops, food prices have increased tremendously. This means that families need to buy food on credit or take out informal loans at high interest rates", says Zeeshan Alvi, Advocacy and Communications officer at HelpAge in Pakistan.
	Future climate change “hotspots” may suffer chronic food problems by Philip Thornton Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)   Study reveals future “Hotspots” of risk for Hundreds of Millions whose Food Problems are on a Collision Course with Climate Change.   Scientists warn Disaster Looms for Parts of Africa and All of India if Chronic Food Insecurity converges with Crop-wilting Weather; Latin America also Vulnerable.   A new study has matched future climate change “hotspots” with regions already suffering chronic food problems to identify highly-vulnerable populations, chiefly in Africa and South Asia, but potentially in China and Latin America as well, where in fewer than 40 years, the prospect of shorter, hotter or drier growing seasons could imperil hundreds of millions of already-impoverished people.   The report, "Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics" (PDF) was produced by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The work was undertaken by a team of scientists responding to an urgent need to focus climate change adaptation efforts on people and places where the potential for harsher growing conditions poses the gravest threat to food production and food security.   The researchers pinpointed areas of intense vulnerability by examining a variety of climate models and indicators of food problems to create a series of detailed maps. One shows regions around the world at risk of crossing certain “climate thresholds”—such as temperatures too hot for maize or beans—that over the next 40 years could diminish food production. Another shows regions that may be sensitive to such climate shifts because in general they have large areas of land devoted to crop and livestock production. And finally, scientists produced maps of regions with a long history of food insecurity.   “When you put these maps together they reveal places around the world where the arrival of stressful growing conditions could be especially disastrous,” said Polly Ericksen, a senior scientist at the CGIAR’s International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya and the study’s lead author. “These are areas highly exposed to climate shifts, where survival is strongly linked to the fate of regional crop and livestock yields, and where chronic food problems indicate that farmers are already struggling and they lack the capacity to adapt to new weather patterns.”   “This is a very troubling combination,” she added.   For example, in large parts of South Asia, including almost all of India, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa—chiefly West Africa—there are 369 million food-insecure people living in agriculture-intensive areas that are highly exposed to a potential five percent decrease in the length of the growing period. Such a change over the next 40 years could significantly affect food yields and food access for people—many of them farmers themselves—already living on the edge.   Higher temperatures also could exact a heavy toll. Today, there are 56 million food-insecure and crop-dependent people in parts of West Africa, India and China who live in areas where, by the mid-2050s, maximum daily temperatures during the growing season could exceed 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). This is close to the maximum temperature that beans can tolerate, while maize and rice yields may suffer when temperatures exceed this level. For example, a study last year in Nature found that even with optimal amounts of rain, African maize yields could decline by one percent for each day spent above 30ºC.   Regional predictions for shifts in temperatures and precipitation going out to 2050 were developed by analyzing the outputs of climate models rooted in the extensive data amassed by the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Researchers identified populations as chronically food-insecure if more than 40 percent of children under the age of five were “stunted”—that is, they fall well below the World Health Organization’s height-for-age standards.   “We are starting to see much more clearly where the effect of climate change on agriculture could intensify hunger and poverty, but only if we fail to pursue appropriate adaptation strategies,” said Patti Kristjanson, a research theme leader at CCAFS. “Farmers already adapt to variable weather patterns by changing their planting schedules or moving animals to different grazing areas. What this study suggests is that the speed of climate shifts and the magnitude of the changes required to adapt could be much greater. In some places, farmers might need to consider entirely new crops or new farming systems.”   Crop breeders at CGIAR centers around the world already are focused on developing so-called “climate ready” crop varieties able to produce high yields in more stressful conditions. For some regions, however, that might not be a viable option—in parts of East and Southern Africa, for example, temperatures may become too hot to maintain maize as the staple crop, requiring a shift to other food crops, such as sorghum or cassava, to meet nutrition needs. In addition, farmers who now focus mainly on crop cultivation might need to integrate livestock and agroforestry as a way to maintain and increase food production.   “International trade in agriculture commodities is also likely to assume even more importance for all regions as climate change intensifies the existing limits of national agriculture systems to satisfy domestic food needs,” said Bruce Campbell, director of CCAFS. “We have already seen with the food price spikes of 2008 and 2010 that food security is an international phenomenon and climate change is almost certainly going to intensify that interdependence.”   Ericksen and her colleagues note that regions of concern extend beyond those found to be most at risk. For example, in many parts of Latin America, food security is relatively stable at the moment—suggesting that a certain amount of “coping capacity” could be available to deal with future climate stresses that affect agriculture production. Yet there is cause for concern because millions of people in the region are highly dependent on local agricultural production to meet their food needs and they are living in the very crosshairs of climate change.   The researchers found, for example, that by 2050, prime growing conditions are likely to drop below 120 days per season in intensively-farmed regions of northeast Brazil and Mexico. Growing seasons of at least 120 days are considered critical not only for the maturation of maize and several other staple food crops, but also for vegetation crucial to feeding livestock.   In addition, parts of Latin America are likely to experience temperatures too hot for bean production, a major food staple in the region.   The study also shows that some areas today have a “low sensitivity” to the effects of climate change only because there is not a lot of land devoted to crop and livestock production. But agriculture intensification would render them more vulnerable, adding a wrinkle, for example, to the massive effort underway to rapidly expand crop cultivation in the so-called “bread-basket” areas of sub-Saharan Africa.   “Evidence suggests that these specific regions in the tropics may be severely affected by 2050 in terms of their crop production and livestock capacity. The window of opportunity to develop innovative solutions that can effectively overcome these challenges is limited,” said Philip Thornton, a CCAFS research theme leader and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Major adaptation efforts are needed now if we are to avoid serious food security and livelihood problems later.” Visit the related web page
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