The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said that a large-scale distribution of wheat seeds to the victims of last year’s floods in Pakistan is expected to yield enough food for half a million poor rural households.
With an average family size of eight, this translates into a harvest large enough to feed four million people for the next six months, FAO said on its website on Wednesday.
FAO said it spent $54 million of international donor funding for buying and distributing quality wheat seeds as part of its emergency intervention that began last August.
Once the harvest is completed, this donation will have produced a crop worth almost $190 million in wheat flour, the main staple, at current local retail prices.
“The investment made by donors has been quadrupled,” said Daniele Donati, Chief FAO Emergency Operations Service. “Moreover, farmers will be able to save seeds from this year’s harvest to plant again later this year.”
More than 18 million people were affected by last summer’s severe flooding, which caused extensive damage to housing, infrastructure and crops.
Farming nearly fully-funded
FAO said that as part of its immediate response to the floods, the UN’s Agriculture Cluster, comprising over 200 organisations, reached 1.4 million farming families across Pakistan.
FAO received $92 million of its $107 million appeal, which has enabled it to shore up the smallholder agricultural system in the four provinces affected by the flooding.
As well as supporting the Rabi wheat planting season, FAO said that it helped save lives of almost a million livestock by supplying temporary shelter and de-worming tablets and dry animal feed for almost 290,000 families. Green fodder is now becoming available as the harsh winter turns to spring.
“The livestock interventions really paid off,” Donati said. “It costs 10 times more to buy a new animal, which often represents a family’s lifetime savings.”
FAO said it is overseeing a thousand cash-for-work schemes by which workers are paid to clear irrigation canals blocked with silt and flood debris.
Sindh yet to receive much help
FAO said that one severely affected province which has not received much help is Sindh. This was because the fields remained waterlogged until well after the end of the Rabi planting season and in some cases are still inundated.
However, it said it will shortly distribute quality rice seeds to almost 25,000 families in Sindh for the upcoming planning season, but over 700,000 families will require assistance over the coming months.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 31st, 2011.
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