Heat waves, rains affect Matiari’s cotton pickers

Peasants deprived of seasonal cotton picking wages face food insecurity

KARACHI:

For 45-year-old Patri Bagri, the constant rising temperature have made her life miserable and believes that it will be difficult to survive in such a harsh environment.

"It is almost impossible to work under burning sun, but we work in the cotton fields to make an earning" Bagri recalls July's first week. "We take a break after few hours and though it is difficult to resume, we push ourselves to finish the work," she said.

However, this year, rain and flood took away the seasonal earning the cotton pickers make every year.

Bagri is one of the about over 70,000 cotton workers in Matiari district who have also been badly affected by heavy rains which started in the third week of July and continued till last week of August.

Despite tough weather, women including Bagri continued picking the cotton for that she waited for almost eight months did not last long.

"We hardly manage to take benefit of the cotton picking season before it started raining," she explained. "The rains ruined all the crops. It destroyed all of us - the landlord and the peasant ­ economically," she added.

According to Provincial Disaster Management Authority's (PDMA) data, the total cropped area in Matiari district was 152,520 acres and 140,833 acres were affected.

The cotton which is also considered as the cash crop was badly affected in all the district on the left bank of the Indus River, including Shaheed Benazirabad, Sanghar, Matiari, Hyderabad, Tando Allah Yar, Umer Kot, Mirpurkhas, parts of Khairpur, Tando Mohammad Khan and Badin.

The farmers in these cotton-producing districts have not been compensated either by their growers nor by the government.

"Who cares about us," questioned Haso, a cotton worker living on the roadside near Sanghar city said. "There is nothing clear if we will be able to have work in coming days," she added.

Commenting the critical situation the cotton workers especially women have been facing since heavy rains, Sindh Community Foundation (SCF) Javed Soz said that: "we have seen one catastrophe after another."

According to SCF, there are over 70,000 cotton workers in Matiari district. "This is one of the main cotton belt areas in Sindh and these workers who mostly rely on this season are completely destroyed financially," he pointed out.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, Soz said that a cotton picker hardly earns Rs300 to Rs400 in a day. "It is less than minimum wage and these people have not been given any benefit by the government," he said. "They were already living below the poverty line and after these floods the situation is critical," he added.

Soz whose organization has been working in the district said that the temperature in the district was record at 40C. "It was between 39 to 42C in last 25 years but this year it was like as if we were not in Matiari rather in Nawabshah," he compared. "The heatwave affected health of these workers and now they do not have anything to eat. We will have another disaster - food shortage."

Not only the cotton, but all the major crops in the district including sugarcane, banana and others have also been affected, disturbing the farmers and daily wagers connected with agriculture sector.

"The impact of climate change is immeasurable," Soz explained. "It is going to hit everyone - poor to rich. We have already warned the government to take precautionary measures and do something about these poor souls."

He said that the world leaders and experts of climate change in Climate Summit in Egypt were discussing the impact global warming across the globe especially in Pakistan must discuss how Pakistan has suffered because of the climate change. "Sindh suffers the most because of the climate change. The people of Pakistan have paid for what they had did nothing," he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 8^th, 2022.