Pakistan floods just one of its water woes
By TIM SULLIVAN (AP)
28 August 2010 SHIKARPUR, Pakistan — Thousands of farmers have crowded this once-quiet Pakistani town. They live on the hospital’s lawn, they camp on overpasses. Their fields are destroyed, covered by billions of gallons of brown soupy floodwater. But ask those farmers about their water troubles and they’ll tell you flooding is just the most recent chapter. “There is not enough water. We don’t have enough for the crops,” said Zubair Ahmed, a tenant farmer who came here after floods swept through his village and destroyed his fields. “Except for this year,” he added, without any irony. “This year it is different.” This country, with its network of rivers that flow into the mighty Indus, struggles daily with water issues — too little, too much, in the wrong place — and rain is important to more than just farmers. Around here, rainfall has long been reflected in economics, politics, diplomacy and social stability — and even Pakistan admits it wasn’t as prepared as it could have been for the flooding. “We are the victims of both extremes,” said Shams ul Mulk, the former head of Pakistan’s Ministry of Water and Power. “We are the victims of scarcity and we are the victims of surpluses.” … Islamabad acknowledges it needs massive repairs to its enormous water irrigation network, which stretches across thousands of miles (kilometers). About 80 percent of the country’s farmers are dependent on irrigation to nourish their crops. Experts say only about one-third of the water that flows through the country’s irrigation system actually reaches the crops. “It’s just dirt ditches most of the time,” said Dr. Daanish Mustafa, a geographer at King’s College, London who has studied Pakistan’s water use and said simply lining the irrigation channels to decrease leakage could result in enormous water savings. “It doesn’t need billions of dollars, it doesn’t need armies of laborers,” said Mustafa. …
