Pakistanis at risk over world inaction on floods, warns UN

The United Nations warned on Monday that the international community had failed to respond to the latest flooding crisis in Pakistan, leaving three million people in urgent need of food handouts. The nuclear-armed Muslim state has suffered two consecutive years of floods but has been at increasing risk of international isolation since US troops found and killed Osama bin Laden near the capital in May. “Somehow the present flooding and the humanitarian impact of the present flooding has not yet picked the interest, the focus of the world,” said Ramiro Lopes da Silva, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP). “If we have no resources, we have no response,” he told a news conference in Islamabad after visiting the flood-hit province of Sindh. On September 18, the United Nations led an appeal for $357 million in emergency funding to shore up rescue and relief efforts for millions of people suffering after floods swept away homes and farm land in southern Pakistan. “The funding is not coming as swiftly and as fast at the levels it came to the response of the floods of last year,” said Lopes da Silva. afp