Media watch: Floods, slow aid and a reality check

15% of Pakistan's cotton crops are destroyed and 8 people die due to lack of medical attention.

Media watch is a daily round-up of key articles featured on news websites, hand-picked by The Express Tribune web staff.

Nature stalks the land

About 40 of the approximately 100 million people who live on the margins of existence within 20 miles of either bank of the Indus have just had that margin wiped out. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side, is largely responsible. Of course, our guardians too must share the blame. Knowing that mass loss of life was likely during a heavy monsoon, protecting the population should have been their foremost priority. But the failure to raise and strengthen bunds, unchecked demographic growth leading to the degradation of the environment, the absence of appropriate healthcare and medicinal supplies, the strangulation of civil and economic infrastructure all coalesced to leave the victim unguarded and the wrecker to rage unhindered. Zafar Hilaly (dailytimes.com.pk)

Aid trickles while the waters flood

According to Pakistan's representative at the UN, the world's failure to stump up enough money for the flood disaster in his country is down to David Cameron's remarks that it was an exporter of terrorism. But his country doesn't need outside critics to put people off giving. Half his own citizens are shouting from the rooftops they have fled to that their own government has failed to respond adequately to the crisis and that most of the aid will end up in the coffers of the ruling elite. Adrian Hamilton (www.independent.co.uk)

15 percent of cotton crop lost: ICAC

'Pakistan lost 15 percent of its cotton crop to flooding, an international farm group estimated, which would reduce the harvest to 1.9 million tonnes. The International Cotton Advisory Committee secretariat said in a statement on Tuesday that "best guesses are that 6-8 percent of the total cotton area has been lost entirely." (brecorder.com)



Out of the frying pan...

'The death of eight injured persons at the Muzaffargarh District Headquarters Hospital for lack of medical attention on Wednesday is a tragic incident, made more poignant and crueller by the circumstances under which the neglect occurred. Reportedly, when the Medical Superintendent pulled up a technician for staying away from work without intimation for six days, there ensued an angry exchange of words between the doctors and the paramedical staff, ending up with strikes by both. As a result, out of the 17 patients, most of them brought to the hospital with floods-related injuries, eight breathed their last. (www.nation.com.pk )


The tide of failure

The second catastrophe: the great floods of 2010 have uncovered 63 years of the great unwashed masses of this country. The people the state has failed in the most terrible of ways, not this week, not last month, but over its entire, sordid history… The floods have brought all those people into our living rooms. Seeing the broken bodies on television, the sunken eyes captured through a photographer’s lens, you can easily deduce many have never seen the inside of a clinic or a school, have probably never had two square meals in a day in their lives — every last one of them a Pakistani, but for whom that is as theoretical a concept as an escape from poverty. Cyril Almeida (dawn.com)