Since mid-June, severe floods in Pakistan have killed over 1,400 people, left one third of the country underwater, and destroyed the homes and livelihoods of several million. The floods are yet another example of our terrifying climate future as weather patterns continue to shift, inflicting droughts on some regions and inundating others in water. They are also a stark reminder of how climate injustices will continue to play out.
Pakistan’s floods drew international attention when the country declared a state of emergency on 25 August but the crisis began much earlier in June with heavier than usual monsoon rains and meltwater from glaciers combining after a severe heat wave. They are the deadliest since 2010 – when Pakistan dealt with super-floods resulting from river surges – and are a result of a much more complex mix of weather trends. Several different regions of Pakistan are experiencing disasters simultaneously: torrential rains in central Sindh and Balochistan, amounting to four times average rainfall; flash floods in southern Punjab and lower Sindh from the Sulaiman mountain range; glacial meltwater outbursts in the upper Indus basin, and outbursts of precipitation in north Pakistan. This coincidence of events is absolutely unprecedented but hints at a terrifying future of catastrophic climate disasters appearing more and more often and combining in unimaginably destructive ways.
In the past three months, 33 million people have been displaced and 10 million made homeless; one million houses have been washed away. In Balochistan, which accounts for nearly half of Pakistan’s land mass, 90% of crops have been destroyed and 80% of livestock killed. Pakistan’s finance minister, Miftah Ismail, has said the floods have inflicted at least $30bn of damage on Pakistan. In the face of this massive destruction, governments of developed countries have offered pittances in aid to Pakistan. Britain has offered a grand total of £25m and the US a paltry $53m, compared to the billions spent on military supplies to Ukraine.
Whilst man-made climate change is clearly a factor in this disaster, Pakistan as a country produces less than 0.9 tons of CO2 per capita (>0.5% of global carbon emissions), as opposed to 15.52 tons per capita (14.02%) for the US and Britain’s 5.55 tons per capita (1.03%), but ranks much higher in countries most prone to climate risk.
Imperialism is directly complicit in this disaster. Before 1947 during British colonisation, Britain used alliances with local elites and property owners to subjugate a previously pastoral people and extract wealth and resources from the land and labour of local farmers. This shift from pastoralism to large-scale farming came with forced settlement of tribesmen and expanding canal irrigation, further exposing the population to floods. Up until and through independence in 1947, wealth disparities between local landlords and peasant farmers dramatically increased and peasant farmers with only simple mud houses found themselves hyper vulnerable to floods that were common in south Punjab. Post-independence, local political elites continued to invest massively into irrigation systems and hydropower infrastructure to further expand cash crop potential, relying on Western consultancies to design and construct projects like the Taunsa Barrage whose faulty World Bank-sanctioned repair in the early 2000s contributed to the devastation of the 2010 floods.
In the 1970s and 1980s, in an effort to rebuild after the 1971 Bangladesh civil war and the 1974 international recession, the Pakistan People’s Party’s economic policy focused on public investment with an emphasis on heavy and basic industries and agriculture, as part of a nationalisation programme. After a coup d’état that ousted the People’s Party, privatisation was furiously pursued, cemented by the conditions of ‘structural adjustment’ demanded by the IMF in 1988 in exchange for loans. This structural adjustment dramatically liberalised Pakistan’s financial system. State-owned development finance institutions were dismantled and replaced by five large commercial banks, four private and one public, and the State Bank of Pakistan (SPB) was removed from government control. Interest rates that used to be controlled by the SPB were now based on the market, and monetary policy geared to profit rather than subsidising priority industries. Most important to western capital, Pakistan was required to remove all trade and export barriers, further opening up Pakistan’s land and people to Western imperialist plunder.
Combined with austerity measures and cuts to government expenditure, liberalisation allowed most land ownership to be concentrated amongst a few political elites. As expected, instead of investing land and crop profits into better flood infrastructure that could protect landless peasants, these parasitic elites invested in speculative real estate in foreign cities to which they could also escape in the event of severe flooding. On top of this extraction, many political elites actively impede effective flood prevention infrastructure because of private interests to keep their own productive land from being replaced by life-saving infrastructure. A gutted government and the private division of land also means that there is little local government organisation and relief planning, leaving landless peasants waiting days and weeks, with no shelter and little safe sustenance, for waters to recede before having a proper home again.
A complex landscape with multiple rivers prone to flooding and land that has been further excavated and destructively shaped to deliver profits to a few elites and the imperialist west means that the only solution that can save lives in Pakistan in the face of spiralling climate disasters is planning for climate resilience. Capitalism will never allow this planning at the cost of profit; socialism is the only option!
Soma Kisan
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 290 October/November 2022
