Agriculture experts said climate change and erratic extreme weather events are causing a surge in natural disasters such as heat waves and floods across the world.

Dr Pashupati Chaudhary highlighted the losses Pakistan faced due to recent floods. The devastating monsoon floods had a big toll on the agriculture sector in Pakistan, seriously affecting food security and global supplies of agricultural commodities exported by the country, he told WealthPK.

He said Pakistan is already undergoing a shortage of 2.6 billion tonnes of wheat. Moreover, as Pakistan is the fifth-largest cotton producer, accounting for five per cent of global output, the damage could further shrink the world’s cotton supply, he said.

Pakistan is the world’s fourth largest rice exporter. The hot and dry conditions early in the season and the recent floods have ravaged large swathes of rice lands and will slash rice yield again, thus impacting the rice economy and food security, he said.

Dr Chaudhry said climate change and increasingly erratic extreme weather events are causing natural disasters and flood is amongst the most frequently occurring disasters affecting several million people and impacting several hundred billion of the economy across the world. Due to climate change, mainly warming, extreme events and flood-led disasters have increased in the recent decades, he said.

Another expert, Dr Ashfaq Ahmad, said Pakistan recently suffered one of the most devastating flood-led disasters. Record monsoon rains, glacier melting and severe heat waves have triggered floods since mid-June 2022, sweeping away houses, roads, railway tracks, bridges, livestock and crops, and killing more than 1,400 people, he said.

He said crops such as cotton, rice, sugarcane, sesame, moong, fodder, orchards and vegetables like onions and tomatoes have been damaged, inundated or washed away. Floods, he said, have also caused land degradation, sand deposition, siltation and prolonged inundation, making the lands unfit for planting winter crops such as wheat, cotton, oilseed and winter vegetables. In some cases, there would be a delay in planting time.

He said Sindh and Balochistan were the hardest hit provinces. Sindh accounts for 55pc of the country’s onion production and it is estimated that the recent floods destroyed about 70pc of it. In Balochistan, it is estimated through local researchers that the recent downpours and flash floods have damaged around 50pc of peach and 30pc of apple.

Moreover, he said, the damages to rural infrastructures such as irrigation canals, roads, markets and warehouses would immensely impact agricultural production, marketing and distribution, particularly for the cotton crop. The federal government has estimated a loss of at least $10 billion caused by torrential rains and subsequent floods, with Sindh, in particular, suffering damages of over $1.6bn (Rs355bn).

Pakistan must be prepared to increase food import to make up for smaller domestic harvests. The countries that generally rely on Pakistan’s exports including rice and cotton will need to find alternative sources, which will put additional pressure on global commodity supplies, he added.

Credit : Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk