In an unprecedented move, a new U.N. climate agreement will pay developing nations for loss and damages caused by global warming. The Pakistan floods served as an impetus for this agreement, but who will help Pakistan as it recovers from the floods that ravaged the region NOW? It will take years to rebuild and recover and the U.N. climate change fund hasn’t even gotten off the ground.
Do people in Pakistan still need relief six months after monsoon flooding?
Yes, the people of Pakistan need your urgent flood relief sadaqah today more urgently than ever, especially children, young mothers, and the rural poor.
(See Why Pakistan Flood Emergency Relief Matters?)
Why are children, young women, and the poorest of Pakistan disproportionally suffering from the floods?
Pakistan is one of the world’s most underdeveloped countries. What little development there is disproportionally serves people in the great urban centers and those in favored government and economic sectors.
This means people of rural areas – like Sindh province, one of the two hardest hit areas by the floods – have very little infrastructure, mobility, and economic capacity to begin with. When a disaster strikes, especially of so massive a proportion as this summer’s floods, children, women in their childbearing years, and people in subsistence livelihoods are the least protected against its devastations.
Children: UNICEF, the UN child relief agency, has recently released an urgent statement saying that more than 10 million flood-stricken children in Pakistan may die of malnutrition, disease, and exposure in just weeks without emergency food, drinkable water, medicine, and proper shelter and outfitting as winter sets in.
Already, of the 1,700-plus initial deaths from the Pakistan floods, more than half were children.
Young Mothers: The same death threat that now looms over Pakistan’s flooded out children also hangs over the heads of hundreds of thousands of women in their child-bearing years, again, especially in the sprawling rural areas of Sindh province for a complex of pre-existing social reasons:
Widespread rural female illiteracy. They cannot read dosage prescriptions or treatment regimens for themselves or children.
A shortage of women physicians and aid workers willing to travel to help the afflicted. While more than two-thirds of Pakistan’s medical students are women, they are unwilling to serve in field clinics because they fear a growing gender-based sexual violence plaguing the nation.
Many rural women will not accept treatment from male doctors or aid workers, while these professionals themselves do not want to risk breaching so strong a cultural divide.
Rural women and families also fear displacing to the unlighted, unsecured government flood camps set up in urban areas for the same reasons.
Rural flood victims say camp residents are kept in zoo-like conditions. There is massive food insecurity and waste in them because military personnel, untrained for humanitarian interventions, simply toss provisions into the air out of moving trucks to frenzied crowds, rendering much of it inedible.
There is a great need for targeted, professional relief intervention by Muslim humanitarian organizations like the Zakat Foundation, which has an established presence in urban and rural areas and teams of local relief experts and workers.
What are the dimensions of this climate-change flooding crisis?
Pakistan’s most vulnerable are paying the highest price for our rich-nation, globally manufactured climate catastrophe.
Its legions of poor have suffered the greatest losses of life and health from the mid-June monsoon climate calamity – which devastated a staggering 33 million, making at least 8 million homeless in just hours, and sinking a mind-boggling one-third of the country’s land mass instantly under water.
This zone of deluge includes a vast 57 million acres of agricultural land that is simply submerged. That’s an area of vital farmland three times larger than the nation of Portugal.
In Sindh province alone, torrential downpours created two gigantic lakes covering 40,000 square miles. That’s like the whole U.S. state of Virginia suddenly under water. Floodwaters have completely covered some 300 villages in Sindh alone and turned dozens more into islands, marooning their residents.
How did these poor live before the flood?
Most of Pakistan’s flood-struck poor are subsistence farmers.
They lost an estimated $20 billion of crops to the floods. (Total flood damage in the nation is in excess of $30 billion, according to World Bank estimates.
Some 750,000 of the farm animals drowned.
With just these two flooding outcomes, Pakistan’s poor farming families have lost most of their investments and wealth.
Flooding wiped out all the cotton subsistence farmers had planted. This means that within hours Pakistan lost about 2% of its GDP in its most lucrative staple crop. Rains and glacier melt run off also swept away more than 50% of the nation’s and poor farmers’ palm, rice, sugar cane, and other yields.
These poor farmers have no savings. Now climate refugees, they literally have no idea when or from where their next meal will come. They cannot find food to feed their starving families and sickened children.
Thousands of children are now emaciated skin and bones, images one cannot bear to look upon. Millions more of our little ones have been struck by malaria, dengue fever, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and other potentially deadly waterborne illnesses.
These children and families have nothing to fall back on – nothing but our Muslim consciences and the compassion from our fear of God.
But shouldn’t the world’s wealthy carbon-spewing nations be responsible for these victims of climate catastrophe?
From the perspective of climate justice, yes. But the “loss and damage” fund that rich nations (as of 20 November 2022 at the COP27 Egypt Climate Summit) have reluctantly and belatedly agreed, in principle, to contribute to for poor countries whose peoples are the victims of rich-nation excess has no hope of reaching Pakistan’s climate-change flood victims in time to save their lives.
But the living Muslim heart instantly feels the utter helplessness and desperation of its brothers and sisters in faith as if they are part of the same body it inhabits. And, at once, it seeks to help.
The believing heart knows that Allah in the Quran and the Prophet, on him be peace, have called us personally and collectively to respond whenever our brothers and sisters, who are part of us, face so dire a test and such overwhelming, life-threatening necessity.
Our spiritual need to provide life-saving aid to the afflicted of Pakistan is every bit as vital to us – our own personal and communal survival as Muslim believers with a living faith, our own Judgment and Hereafter – as is our material relief to these flood victims for their physical survival.
Each of us – the flood victims and the secure blessed – face death if we enabled ones, by Allah’s mercy, fail to act … we of our hearts, them of their earthly lives.
Pakistan’s flood inundated need us. But we need them just as much, to confirm our faith (which is what sadaqah means) – if, indeed, we are Muslims.
What have Allah and the Prophet, on him be peace, told us about helping Muslims struck by disaster?
Allah has made clear to Muslims from the beginning that the nature of our communal and individual relationship is that we are each other’s keepers:
Indeed, those who have believed and emigrated with the Prophet and striven with their wealth and their persons in the path of Allah, and also those who gave them shelter and help — it is these who are allies of one another.” (Surat Al-Anfal, 8:72)
As for the believing men and the believing women— all of them are allies of one another. They enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong. Moreover, they duly establish the Prayer, and give the Zakat-Charity, and they obey Allah and His Messenger. It is these upon whom Allah shall have mercy. Indeed, Allah is overpowering, all-wise.” (Surat Al-Tawbah, 9:71)
Rather, the [Muslims who are settled] give [the ones who have come to them in need] preference over their own selves – even when they themselves are in pressing need. And whoever is safeguarded from the avarice of his own soul – then it is these who are the truly successful.” (Surat Al-Hashr, 59:9)
And our beloved one, our model, Prophet Muhammad, on him be peace, taught us:
The likeness of the believers in their tenderness toward one another, their mercy for each other, and the empathy they together share is like the body. When a part of it pangs with pain, the entire body responds with sleeplessness and fever.” (Bukhari and Muslim)
As Muslims, we all together feel the harm that has struck any one of us. Then we quickly and collectively react to relieve that suffering until it has passed.
In another parable of the believers, he said, on him be peace:
The Muslims are like a single man. If his eye aches, all of him aches. And if his head aches, all of him aches.” (Muslim)
Allah and His Messenger, on him be peace, have made clear to us that we Muslims are of one another. The Prophet, on him be peace, showed this to us by interlacing his blessed fingers of each hand together and saying:
Indeed, the believer to the believer is like the brick-built edifice. One part bolsters the other.” (Muslim)
And Allah exhorted us to the good fight, unified stoutly together in His cause – and this is every bit the good fight in His cause:
Indeed, Allah loves those who fight in His cause in solid ranks, as though they were a unified structure, joined firmly together. (Surat Al-Saff, 61:5)
What other problems besides disease and displacement have the floods created?
Inflation and disaster profiteering instantly came in with the floods. Food prices have skyrocketed. Wheat for the country’s food staple, roti pancake bread, has doubled. Most of the afflicted people in Pakistan earn no more than $3 to $4 a day. They cannot afford food.
Fuel costs have also doubled, raising making transport costs for the country’s bulk of menial laborers half their earnings.
With Europe’s worldwide bid to replace Russian liquified natural gas for heating because of the Ukraine war, its cost in Pakistan has tripled.
The floods wiped out nearly 20,000 schools. These need to be rebuilt, which will take time, and so interim educational means must be instituted. There is no doubt otherwise that child labor will become rampant in this uncertain interim and sentence rural children to a life of illiteracy and subsistence.
In Pakistan, agricultural land and farming operate as a feudal system. Wealthy landowners charge forbidden riba-interest exceeding 108% to subsistence farmers for their seeds and fertilizers. This already exorbitantly usurious sum that keeps subsistence farmers locked in an unbreakable cycle of poverty will go up even higher – with the flooding on top of it now wiping out the poor’s crop and property wealth.
In addition, godless disaster profiteers are now charging the impoverished, sick rural people, literally marooned by the floods on tiny land rises, their surviving animals and remaining possessions as the price to transport them and their families by wooden fairies to dry land, where they can trek to safer places.
Is there now a mass migration from rural to urban areas?
No. Most of these subsistence farming families will not go far from their homes and farmlands – even if flooded – because it holds all their wealth, and they fear others will occupy it or take their remaining possessions.
They know also the cities cannot absorb their numbers or provide them adequate food, shelter, or medical care. More than 1 in 3 people in Pakistan is a subsistence farmer (38%).
In addition, in the past decade, Pakistan has severely restricted NGO presence in the country. Far fewer relief agencies operate in-country now, meaning the people have lost considerable on-the-ground humanitarian expertise and aiding hands to organize and deliver help to them.
Can Zakat Foundation help Pakistan’s poor flood victims?
Yes, insha’Allah (God willing).
Zakat Foundation of America has had a strong and growing humanitarian presence in Pakistan for nearly two decades.
It remains a top-tier expert international charity channel directly to people in need there, specializing in the country’s outlying areas, where it has outfitted many schools with solar power and provided subsistence families with tens of thousands of Ramadan, iftar fast-breaking meals and thousands of pounds of freshly slaughtered Hajj udhiyah-qurbani meat.
In addition, Zakat Foundation provides complete healthcare services through hospitals and clinics.