Soil enrichment: In Charsadda, crops wilt under piles of silt

Almost a year after the floods, farmers still await help in desilting their lands.

CHARSADDA:

Crop yields in Hassaabad Village, about 25 kilometres from Charsadda, have fallen by as much as 75 per cent, according to local farmers. The worst of last July’s floods might be over, but farmers in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are still grappling with the destruction caused by the raging waters.

The village was one of the worst hit areas in the district. Large tracts of land have been left untilled, and farmers are stuck trying to work out solutions on their own. Huge mounds of silt, moved by farmers who have removed the accumulated silt on their own, still cover large tracts.

Khalid Khan, a farmer, told The Express Tribune, “The floods destroyed all of our standing crops. The land is still laden with silt and we have no resources to remove layers of mud that were left by the receding water.”

“Removing this silt is the biggest problem for us,” Khan said. He said that the yield from a tract of land that produced around one ton of oats has dropped by about 65 per cent.

Khalid said that the costs they are incurring in removing the mud is exorbitant and restoring farm output to pre-flood levels will take years.

He said that silt has damaged at least 25 acres of his farmland and he had to run a tractor for 412 hours to clear one-and-a-half acres at a cost of Rs208,000.

“The rest of my farmland is still lying covered with silt. I do not have the money to afford the heavy machinery required to clear it all,” he said, adding that after removing the silt they need vehicles to move it somewhere else. That in itself requires more money.

The farmers here mainly grow sugarcane and wheat, while maize is grown as fodder.

Fasihullah, another farmer, said that they lost two crops, “First our standing sugarcane crop was destroyed, secondly, we were unable to plough wheat on time. I suffered losses of Rs1.1 million and got nothing from the NGOs or the government.”

He said that 17 acres of his land was still buried under silt and he was trying to restore it using his own resources.

Even large landholders complain that they did not get anything as seeds meant for them were allegedly sold in the market by aid agencies, and barely 25 per cent of it reached deserving people.

Arshad Ali, a farmer, told The Express Tribune that they got nothing from the government and aid agencies.

“The authorities mainly surveyed and assessed the damages to small households and large landholders were left out of the process,” Ali complained.

Arshad said that this area was canal irrigated and the system, badly damaged in the floods, is yet to be fully restored.

He said the floods left around three to five per cent of residue on their lands and it takes at least Rs80,000 to clear just 45 square metres of land. He said that an NGO brought sugarcane seed worth Rs2.1 million to their area, but the next day they told him that it was meant for another village nearby.

“I asked them if they could give me a portion as most of the lands in that area are also owned by me. Instead they instigated the whole community against me. I was threatened by armed locals, so I let them keep the whole stock of seeds,” Arshad said. He had to manage all of his seeds from his personal finances.



Published in The Express Tribune, April 10^th, 2011.