Multan, known as the city of saints for its stunning Sufi shrines, now has a gleaming new airport, pothole free roads with flyovers and fancy metal and glass shopping malls. It is without doubt a prosperous city, the main hub of the country’s cotton industry, whose infrastructure has improved vastly in the past few years. However, just a few miles from the outskirts of the city in the surrounding district where wheat, cotton and sugarcane is grown on the fertile soil near the Chenab River, the situation is dire for many villagers.

“Our minds are weak from poor nutrition, we really can’t remember much,” says an exhausted looking Nazeeran Bibi, a small farmer, as she sits on a charpoy and tries to recall the training she was given on climate change by a local NGO called Doaba Foundation that has been working to empower communities living on the banks of the nearby Chenab River. Tasleem Bibi, her neighbour in the village of Sitarey Wali, points to her nine-year-old son, Shaan, who looks like a child of just five years.

Due to extreme poverty, Tasleem Bibi, mother to five daughters and a son, cannot afford to buy her son the fruits and the meat the doctor says he needs to grow. She lost her husband a few years ago and gets by doing fieldwork on other people’s land and survives on the potatoes, peas and a few other vegetables she grows herself. Every now and then her neighbours and extended family give her extra food out of charity.

The government and big businesses must work with farmers to deal with the changing weather so that there’s enough food grown for all

Most of Nazeeran Bibi’s neighbours don’t have land of their own but cultivate the agricultural land of large landholders in the area; the villagers are mostly trapped in debt as they get seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, etc. on credit from shopkeepers or their landlords and then have to pay the money back with interest once they harvest their crops. The recent floods that hit the area in September 2014 submerged over 100 villages of Multan and destroyed all their standing crops. The villagers are still reeling from their losses. “The river is 3km away but it flooded and destroyed the wheat crop that was ready for harvesting,” recalls Nazeeran Bibi. The ferocious floodwaters let loose by heavy monsoon rain caused the Chenab to overflow, barely sparing the city of Multan itself. Early warning was given and many villagers were evacuated from low-lying areas.

“The water came all the way up to my house and ruined everything but I refused to move away because there was looting going on; people started stealing from those who had abandoned their homes,” explains Nazeeran Bibi who almost starved as she waited around 12 days for the floodwater to recede.

The Doaba Foundation helped in the rescue efforts by providing a boat and many people living in the villages near the river were able to save some of their precious belongings and livestock along with evacuating the young and elderly. The Doaba Foundation partners with the Indus Consortium that works for local communities to enhance their resilience.

In April 2014 they launched a campaign in five villages of the area, funded by Oxfam, called “GROW” whose goal is to “be part of building a future where everyone has enough to eat, always” given the fact that global hunger is rising.

The campaign, which has now been launched in 53 countries across the world, aims to empower women and men who farm land so that they can grow and buy enough food to eat. That means: “changing the weak and unfair rules that govern how the world’s land and water are used, and the way climate change is being tackled”. The idea is to invest in the productivity, resilience and sustainability of small-scale food producers.

The priority for the first year of the GROW campaign in Multan district was to raise awareness in targeted local communities about “Climate change and Food Justice”. Hence trainings were given to small farmers gathered into community organisations in each of the selected five villages. “With climate change there is either too much water in the form of floods or too little as in drought and it has made us small farmers very vulnerable,” explains Ghulam Sarwar, a farmer living in Hasnabad village, Multan district. “We have learnt from our trainings to plant trees which will provide us with fuel and shade and also help us during the floods. We have also learnt to keep dry rations during monsoon season to help us during the floods and to change the timings of planting certain crops, as summers are now longer and winters shorter with more extremes in weather. We also want the government to change its policies and do more to help us small farmers.”

According to Oxfam, the last four years of continuous flooding in Pakistan has had a long-term impact on our farmers’ ability to produce food. The roots of hunger, they explain, lie in unequal access and control over resources like land and water, and in the growing impact of global warming on small-scale farmers’ crops. Women, who produce the majority of the world’s food, face the greatest challenges and it is women like Nazeeran Bibi and Tasleem Bibi who are the most in need of help. Building flyovers and new airports is not enough — the government should be investing in our farmers’ future and making Pakistan more resilient to climate change.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 5th, 2015

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