BY Tooba Syed
“Since the floods happened, I have had to send my two young daughters away to the city to work. They are working 12-15 hours a day to earn 10,000 Pakistani rupees. They were living like princesses, their father’s favourite was the eldest one. We could have still managed after the floods but the price hikes are too much to bear now,” shares Razia with me. Razia is a 32-year-old single mother I met during my recent trip to the flood-affected regions of Sindh. Razia’s house was washed away when the floods hit the region.
Razia is not the only one. Millions of people share similar stories of dispossession and despair. Pakistan suffered from devastating floods towards the end of 2022. In the southern parts of the country, the entire province of Sindh, along with parts of Balochistan and Southern Punjab were completely submerged. When the devastating floods hit Pakistan, millions were rendered homeless. 60,000 pregnant women were deprived of access to birthing spaces and medical care. Thousands of young women were struggling without access to menstrual hygiene products.
Trans bodies suffered equally and, in some instances, experienced worse effects of the disaster. In the absence of government infrastructure for disaster management and flood relief, activists witnessed that religious minorities and the khawaja sira (the indigenous transgender community) communities were often discriminated against during aid distribution. In these times, young activists from the left formed collectives such as Mahwari Justice (Menstrual Justice), and Women Democratic Front stepped forward to provide nutrition for lactating mothers, hygiene products and birthing kits for menstruating and pregnant women and food rations for marginalised communities.
While the floods unfolded, mainstream media channels and politicians were busy reporting and negotiating yet another IMF loan to avoid defaulting on our payments. It was only in the last week of August 2022, over a month after the initial flooding, that news channels finally began reporting on the impacts of the devastating floods.
Currently, flood-affected people are still displaced; farmers have lost lands to cultivate and this has led to food shortages and a loss of livelihoods. While Pakistan is reeling from the devastating floods, it is also struggling to meet the IMF conditions and grappling with inflation. The IMF has asked the government of Pakistan to liberalise the exchange rate – Pakistan’s currency fell to a record low of 264 PKR against the US Dollar in January 2023. This resulted in increases in fuel and energy prices, leading to further inflation and food insecurity. Food prices are already skyrocketing – how are people, especially those already at the margins, surviving? Nobody knows and nobody cares, especially the IMF.
The impact of the IMF and its debt cycle is enormous on the bodies of those of us from developing countries. Decreasing public sector spending such as healthcare and privatisation of health directly impacts gendered bodies. Women already perform the care work within the domestic sphere; with reductions in public spending and the government’s inability to spend on the rehabilitation of flood affected, it is women’s bodies that labour to sustain families. With the rise in inflation, it is women’s bodies which are made available for underpaid and often unpaid labour.
It is no longer a fight for economic sovereignty but a fight for survival. There is an urgent need to build third-world internationalist politics to fight for debt cancellation and build transnational solidarities. In the case of Pakistan, colonialism, especially canal colonisation and the debt-fueled development projects via imperialist interventions in its waters, are major causes of flooding in the country. Climate justice is not possible without colonial reparations and debt cancellation. In the absence of a real political coalition, the countries of the global South will continue to suffer at the hands of neoliberal economic models and International Financial institutions. The social movements of the past have been replaced with depoliticised NGOized narratives in the global South. There is little that NGOs and INGOs, funded by the global North, can achieve, especially in the absence of a critical mass of people rallying behind them. The need of the hour is a people’s movement across the region to form a coalition for debt cancellation of the countries that have been ravaged by colonialism and neoliberal economic policies of the first world. Feminist collectives and organisations can play a critical role in forming such a people’s coalition for the global South. Only those of us dying under debt can bring an end to the continuous exploitation of our bodies, our lands and our waters.