Battered by floods and debt, Pakistan farmers struggle to survive

By Christina Goldbaum & Zia ur-Rehman

The young woman waded into the waist-deep floodwater that covered her farmland, scouring shrivelled stalks of cotton for the few surviving white blooms. Every step she took in the warm water was precarious: Her feet sank into the soft earth. Snakes glided past her. Swarms of mosquitoes whirred in her ears. But the farmworker — Barmeena, just 14 — had no choice. “It was our only source of livelihood,” she told visiting New York Times journalists. She is one of the millions of farmworkers whose fields were submerged by the record-shattering floods that have swept across Pakistan. In the hardest-hit regions authorities have warned that the floodwater may not fully recede for months.

Still, wherever the water has receded even a bit, farm labourers are scrambling to salvage whatever they can from the battered remains of their cotton and rice harvests. It is desperate work. Many already owe hundreds or thousands of dollars to the landlords whose fields they cultivate each year as part of a system that has long governed much of rural Pakistan.

Each planting season, the landlords offer the farmers loans to buy fertiliser and seeds. In exchange, the farmers cultivate their fields and earn a small cut of the harvest, a portion of which goes toward repaying the loan. But now their summer harvests are in ruins. Unless the water recedes, they will not be able to plant the wheat they harvest each spring. Even if they can, the land is certain to produce less after being damaged by the floodwaters. Such extreme weather events that damage crop yields and sink farmers into mounting debt are becoming increasingly common and are unlikely to end. The unpredictability of the seasons has led some members of farming households to migrate to cities. That, in turn, has landlords worried about a coming farm labour shortage, they say. But other farmers feel they have no choice but to stay.

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“Our life goes like that — sinking into debt, not earning the money to pay it back, and then we do it again,” said Mairaj Meghwar, 40, a farmer who lives in the village of Lal Muhammad in Sindh, the region that sustained the most flood damage. Lal Muhammad is home to around 40 families, their mud brick houses nestled between fields of tall grass and connected by dirt paths. The nearest town is about an hour’s drive by motorcycle, and on either side of the long, flat road are rolling fields of cotton.

Like others in neighbouring villages, most of the families here have tilled this land for more than 100 years. Part of the small, lower-caste Hindu minority in Pakistan, their ancestors carved a living working the fields when it was still considered British India and remained after the British partitioned the subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. For as long as Meghwar can remember, the rhythm of life has been driven by the land. Each fall, he spends two or three months watering, levelling the fields before sowing neat rows of wheat seeds by hand. Each spring, his family pours into the fields to harvest the wheat and then prepares the land to plant cotton seeds that bloom each fall.

The harvests are his family’s lifeline. The cash they get from the cotton pays for necessities they need. But even more important is the wheat, which provides his family a staple food to last the entire year.

So when monsoon rains pounded the village and fields for 56 hours straight earlier last month — plunging one harvest underwater and raising the prospect of missing the planting season for another — panic set in. As the water level continued to rise, he and his family moved to the nearby road — a bit of higher land . Every few hours, he went to the field and watched, helplessly, as the water rose higher and higher until the white cotton blooms were submerged in brown sludge. When the deluge finally stopped, the entire village rushed to survey the damage. Nearly everyone’s home was either entirely or partially destroyed. But even more devastating were the fields.

Weeks later, when the water began to recede, women rushed back to the fields, desperate to salvage any cotton they could. One recent evening, Padooma trudged through the muddied field, dissecting each surviving bloom to find any small pieces untouched by black stains. The foot of water covering the field was green, the sludge thick. Above her head, dragonflies trace circles in the air.

Every night for weeks, Meghwar has placed a stick in the remaining floodwater and returned to check it at dawn . Usually this time of year, he would be preparing the land to plant wheat by mid-October — a deadline that is fast approaching. Many of their neighbors’ fields are still submerged, their hopes for planting wheat all gone. But even if Meghwar manages to plant wheat in time, his prospects are still dim. He already owes his landlord $400 for the seeds and fertilizer he used to plant the cotton, he said. Gathering everything he needs to plant the wheat would mean borrowing more money. Digging himself out of debt feels all but impossible.