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Change Your Life! |
Camels die of thirst in South Asia drought, few lessons learned |
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May 1, 2000 GYPSUM HALT, India, APR 30 (AP) - As India mourned the deaths of 10,000 people in a cyclone in the eastern state of Orissa last November, wells were drying up and crops withering in the arid west as drought spread into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
By the time India lifted its eyes from one disaster to deal with another, more than 80 million people were suffering from lack of water and hundreds of thousands of animals were dead or dying in what the sufferers call the worst drought in a century.
Even once too-watery Orissa is one of the 11 Indian states where crops have failed and rotting livestock carcasses bake in heat that discourages even vultures.
"When a camel dies from lack of water, it is a drought," said Khalid Mansour, a spokesman in Afghanistan for the World Food Program, which is working to prevent a mass exodus by distributing extra wheat, and encouraging villagers to dig deeper wells.
The organization is feeding 400,000 people whose crops have failed on parched land in Afghanistan, and the Taliban rulers say they are sending daily loads of water by helicopter to remote villages of Helmand, Nimroz, Herat, Kandahar and Zabul provinces.
To prevent mass starvation and disease, the Taliban have relocated 250,000 nomads and villagers from drought-stricken western Afghanistan to Kandahar, where water is available, said a Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Muttmain.
The exodus has already begun in Pakistan's southern Sindh province, where villagers who have trekked across the desert say those they left behind had nothing to eat but bark from withered, leafless trees.
There has been no rain this year in Thar, 500 kilometers (310 miles) east of Karachi on the Arabian Sea, where Ghanish Lal says people are starving and women walk miles (kilometers) to find water.
"Famine is followed by formidable sand storms and cyclonic whirlwinds that scorch every straw in the pastures and leave no option for us except to leave," Lal said.
There are no official figures of the dead or the number who have migrated in Pakistan.
In seven or eight weeks, Indian forecasters say the monsoon rains will come, although they will be weaker than last year, and as they move north, the crisis will ease, until next year.
In the meantime, India's federal and state governments throw open their granaries where millions of tons of emergency stocks of grains lie for years, sometimes rotting. The grain has been loaded onto trains, trucks and ships and sent to the disaster areas, where it is sold at subsidized rates to the poor.
"In a macro sense it is actually advantageous because it means cutting down the stocks of grains. The government gets its money back," said Yoginder Kumar Alagh, an agricultural economist and a former federal minister.
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