8/22/10

Pakistan flooding "the biggest emergency on the planet today”

Pakistan's biggest floods in its history have inflicted widespread suffering throughout the country, the UN calling it “probably the biggest emergency on the planet today”!

UN aid agencies have indicated that more than 20 million people are affected by the floods in Pakistan, with 6 million people in need of immediate assistance, adding that the relief operation remains underfunded.

Pakistan's permanent representative to the UN Office at Geneva has appealed for more international attention and support for his country, describing the disaster as "unprecedented."

Bill Berger, USAID's principal regional adviser for South Asia, told the BBC, "I just don't think the world has realizes the magnitude of this now, because this story has just been slowly increasing. It doesn't have the drama of an earthquake that impacts a huge number of people all at once."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon summed up the relative enormity: “Almost 20 million people need shelter, food and emergency care. That is more than the entire population hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake, Cyclone Nargis and the earthquake in Haiti -- combined.”

1 comment:

Grant Montgomery said...

Put another way, the number of people affected by the Pakistani floods is:

More than three times that of Haiti's earthquake

More than 10 times that of Hurricane Katrina.