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Bumper harvest rots amidst military assault - LahoreEstate - 05-24-2009 06:36 AM
YAR HUSSAIN CAMP: Farmers in Pakistan’s northwest were preparing for a bumper harvest when a military assault against Taliban fighters sent them fleeing their homes.
They fear hardship and hunger as crops spoil in untended fields, with aid agencies warning that it could take years for farmers to recover.
Aerial bombardments, shelling and fierce battles between government troops and insurgents in the northwest have uprooted about 1.5 million people from their homes since the onslaught began on April 26.
Most of them were farmers who abandoned fields of wheat, maize, vegetables and rice, which now lie rotting as the battles rage.
‘I have left it at the mercy of Allah, only he can now look after my fields and my crop,’ said 68-year-old Fazal Karim, standing under the scorching sun outside his tent at Yar Hussain camp just south of the fighting.
Karim grows onions, wheat and rice on five acres of land in a small village in the fertile Swat valley, but as Taliban fighters infiltrated his hometown, he left the cool mountains for the dusty government-run camp.
‘The wheat crop was almost ready. I think I should forget about my crop. It will ruin me financially and I will have no money to live,’ he told AFP.
Agriculture accounts for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s gross domestic product and many people depend on the land in Buner, Lower Dir and Swat districts, where the military has gone on the offensive against the Taliban.
North West Frontier Province is Pakistan’s second largest source of fruit and vegetables after Punjab province, and is a key wheat producing area.
Dominique Frankefort, emergency coordinator with the UN World Food Programme, said the timing of the military offensive was ‘very unfortunate.’
‘It is harvest season right now, so if they miss this harvest, it is going to be another 12 months before they can produce their own food,’ he told AFP.
Currently, donor response to the humanitarian crisis is sluggish, he said, and the United Nations is struggling to come up with the money needed to feed internally displaced persons (IDPs) until the end of the year.
When they do finally start trickling back to their home villages, they will need even more support, as many of the displaced are dependent on their land not just for income, but food for their families.
‘People will face a lack of food and income very soon, even when the conflict is over,’ said Rienk Van Velzen, regional communications director for aid agency World Vision.
‘These people live on a very minimum already, and then they had to flee and leave everything behind. Is it being looted? We don’t know, but they end up in an even poorer situation than they were already.’
Faizul Bari, emergency coordinator for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, said they urgently needed 20 million dollars from donors to start providing families with seeds for replanting.
Without it, he told AFP, it would be three years before farmers could live without the help of aid agencies and a government itself in dire straits.
But confusion abounds about the situation in the conflict zone, with the interior minister Sunday saying it was safe to return to Lower Dir and Buner.
Hundreds of people flooded onto a road heading to Buner two days later, said an AFP photographer, piled on tractors and carrying scythes for harvesting their fields, desperate to reach their crops.
But shelling continued ahead and the road remained closed.
Muhammad Zaman, a 45-year-old wheat farmer from near Swat’s main town of Mingora, says he only has a 10-day window before his crop is ruined, but is not hopeful of leaving Yar Hussain camp any time soon.
‘I can’t go to my area and harvest because of the curfew. The area is infested with Taliban,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I will be able to save my crop. There will be nothing left
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