Pakistan’s water shortage
creates dangerous agriculture conditions
By CCTV’s Danial Khan Report
A
Pakistan Minister has warned that scarcity of water is a
major issue looming in the country and efforts need to be
made to resolve it right away.
Pakistan is already facing
a massive power and gas shortage.
Pakistan’s water woes
began in 1960, when the country’s Field Marshall Ayub Khan
surrendered Pakistan’s main water supply to India in a deal
complicit with the World Bank.
Pakistan lost three of its
principle rivers, located in the upper Himalayas. These
rivers, Jehlum, Ravi and Suthluj, flowing through
Indian-occupied Kashmir and jealously guarded by Indian
troops, are now running dry.
Pakistan could become another
Sahara, extinguishing all signs of life. Pakistan’s fabled
irrigation network, established by its colonial rulers, is
now in shambles.
Pakistan was known as the bread basket of the subcontinent
in days gone by.
Today it is known as a
begging bowl, seeking millions of tons of wheat and other
food items from foreign countries every year.
“For the past several years,
drought and water shortage have reached a critical stage in
the food growing areas, especially in Sindh and Punjab
provinces,” economic expert Khizer Mahmood Zaidi said.
“The federal and provincial
governments have repeatedly declared the water shortages as
critical, but no one seems to be taking this issue
seriously.”
The rapidly increasing population in Pakistan is already
experiencing drought conditions and critical water shortages
in cities with a steady downfall in agricultural output as
the challenge of climate change and global warming looms
dangerously close.
Meanwhile, crop-growing
areas in all the provinces are endangered on account of
water scarcity.
The planners are unable to
cope with the problem.
“More dams should be planned, and this should be done in war
footing,” Zaidi said. “Pakistan’s economy depends on its
agriculture, and without water resources there will be no
agriculture and no economy. It is disastrous.”
Pakistan is heading towards the worst water shortage in the
next couple of years due to insufficient water management
practices and storage capacity.
India has diverted Pakistani water and is building more dams
which would further worsen the water situation in Pakistan.
March 2015
Source: CCTv
America
