Flooding in Pakistan

Floods in Pakistan have affected more people than those displaced in the 2004 Asian Tsunami and the deadly earthquakes in South Asia and Haiti combined, the United Nations said. The number of homes destroyed or seriously damaged is 290,000, it said. The U.N. will issue an appeal for several hundred million dollars of aid for Pakistan.

“The flood and the devastation caused a very huge human catastrophe,” Safder Hussain Mehkri, a vice chairman of the Rice Exporters’ Association of Pakistan, said by phone today. “We need to rebuild the lives of these people.”

The flooding is “Pakistan’s worst national disaster,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said in a televised speech yesterday. On a tour of Sindh and Punjab, the country’s most populous provinces and its biggest agricultural zone, Gilani told reporters that the destruction of roads, bridges and towns has set Pakistan’s economic development back by years