Flooding ‘has ruined farms in Bangladesh’

As food aid rolls out to more than 200,000 people in flood-hit Bangladesh, the United Nations has said that long-term food supplies were at risk with so much farmland now ruined.Flooding, which submerged more than a third of the low-lying and densely populated country in the last two weeks, has killed at least 132 people and affected more than 7.5mn people, disaster ministry officials in Bangladesh said on Wednesday.“Many flood survivors have lost everything: their homes, their possessions, their crops,” the UN World Food Programme’s (WFP) Bangladesh country director, Christa Rader, said in a statement.“People need food right now, and the full impact on longer-term food security threatens to be devastating.”Widespread floods in recent weeks have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced more than a million in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, with aid workers predicting severe food shortages and water-borne diseases as rains continue to lash the affected areas.Many families in temporary shelters in northwest Bangladesh are unable to return home and risk hunger and poverty, WFP said.Seasonal monsoon rains, a lifeline for farmers across South Asia, typically cause loss of life and property every year between July and September, but officials say this year’s flooding is the worst in several years.Crops on more than 10,000 hectares of land have been washed away while another 600,000 hectares of farms have been damaged, the disaster ministry said.WFP is giving 100,000 elderly and disabled people and households without men 4,000 taka ($49) a month for three months to buy necessities like food.The death toll from floods sweeping South Asia has climbed above 1,000, officials said yesterday, as rescue teams try to reach millions stranded by the region’s worst monsoon disaster in recent years.Thousands of soldiers and emergency personnel have been deployed across India, Bangladesh and Nepal, where authorities say a total of 1,013 bodies have been recovered since August 10 when intense rainfall started falling.All three countries suffer frequent flooding during the monsoon rains, but the Red Cross has termed the latest disaster the worst in decades in some parts of South Asia.It says entire communities have been cut off and many are short of food and clean water.“It has been a difficult year,” said Anil Shekhawat, spokesman for India’s national disaster response force.“In the last few months there have been floods in western, eastern and northern parts of the country,” Shekhawat told AFP.Twenty-six bodies were found Wednesday in Bihar, a hard-hit state in India’s east, taking the death toll there to 367, said Anirudh Kumar, a top state disaster management official.“We still have nearly 11mn people affected in 19 districts of the state,” he told AFP, adding nearly 450,000 flood evacuees had taken shelter in government refuges.In neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, floods have swamped nearly half the vast state of 220mn, India’s most populous. Disaster management agency spokesman T P Gupta said 86 people had died and more than 2mn were affected by the disaster there. The state borders Nepal, where 146 people have died and 80,000 homes destroyed in what the United Nations is calling the worst flooding in 15 years.Nepal’s home ministry warned the death toll could rise as relief teams reach more remote parts of the impoverished country.In India’s northwest, landslides caused by heavy rain have claimed 54 lives, the vast majority in one huge avalanche of mud that swept two buses off a mountainside.The situation was slowly easing in West Bengal and Assam, two states in India’s east and northeast where 223 people have died.Floods in Assam — the second wave to hit the state in less than four months — have wrought widespread destruction, killing 71 people and forcing animals in a local wildlife sanctuary to seek higher ground.One Bengal tiger and 15 rare one-horned rhinos were found dead and conservationists feared there could be further loss of life as poachers sought to capitalise on the exodus.In the low-lying state of West Bengal, where 152 people have died, hundreds of thousands have escaped submerged villages by boats and makeshift rafts to reach government aid stations.Across the border in Bangladesh, water levels were slowly returning to normal in the main Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers.Every year hundreds die in landslides and floods during the monsoon season that hits India’s southern tip in early June and sweeps across the South Asia region for four months.Last year nearly 1,500 people died and half a million homes were destroyed in floods across the country, according to India’s home ministry.