Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - Pakistan's foreign minister said on Sunday that the country needs money to deal with the "overw...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - Pakistan's foreign minister said on Sunday that the country needs money to deal with the "overwhelming" floods. He added that he hoped financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund would take the economic effects into account.
Floods in the north and south of the country have been caused by monsoon rains that were much heavier than usual. More than 30 million people have been affected, and more than 1,000 people have died.
In an interview with Reuters, Pakistan's Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said, "I've never seen destruction on this scale. It's hard to describe. It's overwhelming." He also said that many crops that provided a lot of the population's income had been destroyed.
He said, "It's clear that this will have an effect on the economy as a whole."
The economy of the South Asian country was already in trouble, with high inflation, a currency that was losing value, and a current account deficit.
This week, the IMF board will decide whether to release $1.2 billion as the seventh and eighth instalments of Pakistan's 2019 bailout programme.
Bhutto-Zardari said that the board was likely to approve the release because Pakistani officials and IMF staff had already come to an agreement. He also said that he hoped the IMF would recognise the effects of the floods in the coming months.
"In the future, I would expect the IMF, the international community, and international agencies to really understand how bad things are," he said.
Benazir Bhutto's son, Asif Bhutto-Zardari, said that the economic effects were still being calculated, but that some estimates put them at $4 billion. He said that he thought the total number would be much higher because of the damage to infrastructure and people's ways of making a living.
The record monsoon rain had already been pointed out by Pakistan's central bank as a threat to the country's economic output because of its effect on agriculture.
Bhutto-Zardari said that Pakistan would ask UN member states to help with relief efforts this week. She also said that the country needed to think about how it would deal with the long-term effects of climate change.
Bhutto-Zardari said, "In the next phase, when we think about rebuilding and repairing, we will talk to the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank."
Bhutto-Zardari said that after the relief work was done, the country would have to figure out how to build more flood- and drought-proof infrastructure and deal with the big changes in the agriculture sector.
"Even though Pakistan's carbon footprint is very small compared to the rest of the world, climate disasters like these keep destroying our country, and we have to figure out how to live in this new world with our limited resources," he said.
