Pakistani State’s Flour Distribution Practice Needs to Adopt Modern Methods

By Zeenia Satti

Distribution management is a science. Are Pakistan’s relevant government functionaries not educated in this science? Why is distribution of free flour frequently turning into a riot, a stampede, a brawl or a violent event which leaves some of the needy maimed for life, or injured for a long period, or dead?

The other day, TV news showed us that while collecting a sack of flour for her family, a woman was shoved around so violently in a crowd gathered for collection of free flour that her arm broke. She was not even interviewed by any TV channel, simply shown as a statistic of one injured. She may be a worker whose salary is entirely reliant on her arm being functional at all times. She came only for a sack of flour to relieve herself of the unbearable expense of having to buy one and left with a limb of her body she needs to earn a livelihood with permanently crippled or weakened beyond repair. Affording critical medical care for a long time is obviously not an option for the poor. The government too cannot guarantee it.

The occasion to collect free grocery should not become an occasion for poor citizens to turn on each other or irreparably harm each other. A caring act of the government should not become an indictment of the systemic hunger forcing humans to behave like desperate animals. Deprivation is a bond. The deprived should be allies helping each other instead of shoving and pushing each other in bid to be first past the goal post, convinced they will be returned empty handed if they don’t make it.

Instead of collecting the needy at a distribution point, government should issue plastic cards with a certain monetary ceiling operative throughout the month and either mandate all local grocery stores to accept these from customers in the same way they accept credit cards, as payments for whatever the government intends to provide free of cost or at subsidized rate, or suffer fine and closure of their business. Most grocery stores have CCTV surveillance installed at the premise to deter looters and provide security to shoppers and shop keepers alike.  In addition to CCTV cameras, most poor people have cellular telephones they can use as evidence of wrongful rejection if the shop refused to accept their plastic card as mode of payment. The government must make prompt payment to the stores to make their program credible and sustainable. The needy will be able to procure the flour they want, when they want, in a safe and hassle-free environment. The bureaucracy will not be able to embezzle funds earmarked for the purpose, at least not easily, and nation’s poor will not be turned, with regular intervals, into a tragic spectacle of want.

The current exercise of distribution of flour provides an enabling environment for corrupt individuals throughout the supply side of operation. Nepotism can thrive when bureaucrats buy from ‘select flour mills’ and keep their cut in return for giving business. Knowing the item is meant for free distribution to the poor only, a callously corrupt businessperson can stuff bags with substandard flour. Ingredients can be counterfeited for greater profit making. Transporters can siphon off desired portion from each bag before delivery. Such practices cannot thrive when plastic cards are issued for purchase of flour bags from any store where other consumers also come to buy the same and where provider is accountable for quality of all merchandise in his store. This ensures proper nutrition, the primary goal of free flour policy. 

The current practice is counterproductive from the end user perspective in multiple ways. It endangers health and safety of citizens. Instead of making the needy grateful to their rulers and cheering them in their adversity, it alienates them from their government because it is psychologically stressful and physically dangerous for them and makes them suffer humiliation in the process of procuring something they want so much.  

Plastic card management is far less costly than bearing the logistical cost of delivery of each sack of flour to each needy citizen. Cost of warehouse, cost of transportation, maintenance of vehicles, employment of manpower at each juncture of chain of operation, not to mention the carbon emissions from diesel or petrol-driven trucks, are unnecessary burdens on treasury and environment both. For the deserving, the time spent waiting in an inhospitable climatic environment threatening to get increasingly more so due to climate change, the cost of medical care to each needy citizen who is exposed to the hazard of sustaining bodily injury each time he or she tries to avail the opportunity of free distribution of flour should also be factored in. Special times like the month of Ramzan add further difficulty to needy citizens’ collective ordeal of procuring free flour by assembling in a designated space during finite hours.

The socio-political cost of promoting a belligerent polity with repeated provocation that renders a community mutually acrimonious must be re-examined. Government’s job is to promote harmony and maintain peace among citizens. Is the current distribution policy achieving this goal? The answer is no. It must be transformed. Mass food insecurity is already a potent driver of unrest and violence. Policy aimed at providing for people should not also result in violence. The current system of food distribution is reminiscent of the archaic system administered in the ancient Roman lepers’ colonies. Civilization has since acquired far more sophisticated practices of giving to the needy. Pakistan too needs to change ways and adopt materially advanced and culturally sophisticated practices.

I plead with our decision makers and policy executors to study how systems aimed at preventing hunger are conceived and administered in modern states and follow the best operational strategies available to us. The internet age has made learning a lot easier but internet cannot implant curiosity to learn in the minds of policy makers and executors. The culture of governance must promote curiosity to learn and adoption of innovation must be exhibited at all times by government functionaries, instead of sticking to old and unsustainable practices that defy the very goals a policy is aimed at fulfilling.  

Author’s bio:

Zeenia Satti is CEO at Pakistan’s People-Led Disaster Management. PPLDM is focused on disaster risk reduction and rural poverty alleviation. Email zeenia.satti@post.harvard.edu. Twitter @Zssatti

Lessons to Learn from the Turkey-Syria Earthquakes

By Raja Shahzeb Khan

From Eurasia Review, March 16, 2023, https://www.eurasiareview.com/16032023-lessons-to-learn-from-the-turkey-syria-earthquakes-oped/.

The death toll from the twin earthquakes that shook a large area of southern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, followed by many aftershocks, now exceeds 50,000 and may still rise. This makes the crisis truly one of the worst natural disasters of our times. The stage in which people must be rescued from immediate danger has largely passed. Anybody still under the rubble of collapsed buildings is dead by now. But the quakes left behind a pressing humanitarian situation and a frantic response effort is still underway. Winter was in full swing when the earthquakes destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes, so survivors who became homeless found it a serious challenge to live. The advent of spring provides some relief, but the massive damage to infrastructure, the homelessness, and the war in Syria mean the situation continues to be dire.

The first month was a race against time, with people literally dying by the thousands each day. Now, it is just a matter of getting people’s lives back to normal. The current situation in that respect is much like the floods in Pakistan, 2022’s big natural disaster. But the international response to that deluge was much smaller than it is for the earthquake disaster even after passing of its most urgent stage. That is no doubt because of the high death toll in Turkey and Syria, while that reported in Pakistan is less than 2,000. But everyone should realize that once people are dead, they are dead. The whole point is to protect those still living from becoming casualties and to pull them out of their suffering. People uprooted by the floods were never in as much danger as those trapped underneath the rubble of fallen buildings, but they needed help as much as those who saw everything around them destroyed by the tremors. Many flood victims still need help. Pakistan has not recovered yet.

It may be hard for the international community to decide where they should allocate their assistance, given how weary the whole world is and the slew of crises occurring at present. The war in Ukraine is one example. Yet it is importance to ponder how the crisis in Turkey and Syria can be managed. Even though the world has extensive experience in managing countless prior disasters like this, a lot more can still be done to innovate and to find ways that people can endure humanitarian catastrophe. Everything from taking advantage of new technologies to resurrecting how human beings survived and lived for tens of thousands of years is important knowledge.

In Turkey and Syria, the challenges for both victims and responders have been immense. The first and largest tremor (7.8 on the moment magnitude scale) struck late at night. Bedtime maximized the number of collapse victims. The second big tremor (7.5), which emanated from a different fault-line nearby, struck nine hours later (the primary earthquake most likely disturbed that fault and set it loose). But its direct human toll was very low because everybody was already safely outside, though those trapped by building collapse became more vulnerable to shifting rubble. Rather, structures weakened by the first quake were finished off in second quake, and of course, destruction of vital infrastructure is a big cause of human toll. But the second earthquake and the entire course of aftershocks, some of which were significant quakes on their own, made it extremely dangerous and difficult for rescue workers to do what they urgently needed to do, excavating collapsed structures and entering buildings still standing to see if there was anyone hurt inside. Help mostly had to come from far away. Many hospitals in the disaster zone were rendered unusable by the quakes and many people who would be tasked with responding to the earthquake were victims themselves, or couldn’t get access to their resources, like aid workers for Syria in Gaziantep. But damaged roads, neighborhoods turned into debris fields, and even closed airports and a fire at Turkey’s Iskenderun port, combined with bad weather conditions, created a logistical nightmare for the entire relief effort.

The situation from start consisted of countless people pinned underneath fallen structures, dying from cold, hunger, thirst, blood lost, crush injuries, etc., and countless severe and traumatic injuries which require emergency medical care. The even bigger number of people who were thrown out of homes also had to survive the freezing cold, rain, and wind. They had a whole day to find a place to sleep, at least.

Earthquakes are a disaster in which impact is determined heavily by timing, making them a game of chance. For example, Europe’s largest earthquake in the last 10,000 years (or so Portuguese scientists say), the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, struck on the morning of All Saints’ Day, when a lot of people were gathered in cathedrals that collapsed on them and candles were lit in many homes, setting off fires that would destroy what was left of Lisbon. And for each person, where they are and what they are doing at the exact moment the seismic waves strike has a big hand in their fate. That, combined with total inability to predict earthquakes more than a few seconds in advance, means that protecting humanity from this terrible natural phenomenon depends on having the right preparations in place at all times, once the seismic risk for each geographic area can be reliably determined.

The main issue is that buildings are meant to shelter people from the outside environment. But earthquakes turn buildings themselves into extremely hazardous environments, that too so quickly that people often don’t have time to safely escape from them. For lower-income countries like Turkey and Syria, buildings are not usually constructed or retrofitted to avoid crumbling in a quake, and even when they are, debris can still go tumbling. Therefore, earthquake survival mainly depends on people taking shelter within smaller hollow structures inside buildings, which is usually furniture.  That is what the “drop, cover, and hold” drill is about. But there may not be sufficient furniture within quick reach, and when the whole ceiling or walls come down, even the sturdiest of beds, desks, and sofas offer little protection. In this situation, the “triangle of life” is sometimes given as an alternative instruction, in which people crouch next to large objects that could hold up large slabs of fallen walls or ceilings, creating a space next to them in which they can survive. This advice is usually refuted for well-developed countries, because smaller debris is always a huge danger, but elsewhere, it indeed is the best go at survival. The latest disaster in Turkey and Syria provides examples of that, such as one first-person account of a child surviving by crouching next to a heater, and another of a man saved by a large steel beam next to him. Remember, Doug Copp based the Triangle of Life theory upon observations of damage from past earthquakes in Turkey.

It is not feasible to make all buildings earthquake-proof everywhere, or to do it quickly. It is easier to design the environment within buildings in such a way that people are adequately sheltered when the building crumbles. Certain rooms, like corridors, bathrooms, or bedrooms, might be built extra strong so they remain intact. The design and layout of furniture should have earthquakes in mind. In order to solve the dilemma between being protected from slabs of concrete or from chunks of concrete, triangle of life and drop, cover, and hold should be combined. That means having a large, solid object and a smaller, hollow one next to it. That will provide maximum protection from any earthquake. This “new home” for a quake victim, should they end up trapped by building collapse, needs essential amenities stocked in it, like food, water, and a whistle or fully charged cellphone. As stated, the circumstances you are in when the quake begins are what determine your chances at survival. So everyone must have situational awareness for each and every location they frequent in order to be cognizant of what preparations to put in place and what actions to take when the moment arrives.

As Turkey and Syria rebuild, they must innovate to be better protected from future quakes or other dangers like war, which also bring buildings down without warning. Destruction is an opportunity to restructure and redesign. In the meantime, survivors need to get by with what they have. For everyone, food and water are big issues, not just the lack thereof but the contamination that is quite common and spreads diseases. By and large, the earthquake victims have found shelter in some way or another. However, vulnerability to an untoward event like a powerful storm remains and since many people are crowded together into small spaces, this risks becoming a breeding ground for communicable diseases. Another problem, given the cultural setting in Turkey and Syria, is the lack of privacy, particularly when it comes to bathing.

There are many aspects to the issue of bodily care, actually. The first bath for earthquake victims is often the most important, as they need to clean off dust and dirt and they have to be checked for any injuries. Now, if a Syrian woman crawled out of a collapsed house and some random men picked her up and brought her to a makeshift shelter, will she be willing to take off her clothes so they look at, clean, and treat any cuts, scrapes, and bruises on her? Would this be done outside next to the fire they lit as their only source of light? Throughout most of humanity’s existence, women would have done this without any thought, because hunter-gatherers revolved their lives around survival and gender-based privacy didn’t become a pervasive norm until the advent of civilization. That now especially holds true for Muslim countries. One video recently making the rounds on social media shows a woman refusing to come out of excavated rubble until her rescuers give her a shawl. Honestly, they say “strong community networks” are needed to make a society resilient to disasters, but an impassable wall between genders undermines human cohesion, and resilience, at its core.

People should also know that, when water is scarce, the best way to get cleaned with minimal water is to have someone else scrub your body and pour water. Plus, one can stand in a basin so the bathwater can be reused for washing clothes. And some might have to wait until clothes dry to get dressed again, whiling away the time wrapped in a warm shroud. Even better, a damp cloth can clean the skin with barely any water used. As for privacy, a bamboo curtain or corrugated metal sheet should do. Technique really matters in survival and there are ways to handle any situation, as long as people can conceive of it and are willing to do it.

Raja Shahzeb Khan is director at Pakistan’s People-Led Disaster Management (PPLDM). His academic focus is on climate change and geopolitics. He can be reached at shahzebkhansaheb@gmail.com.

Helping Türkiye and Syria is Pakistan’s Need of the Hour

By Raja Shahzeb Khan

While the most pressing stage of the humanitarian crisis in Türkiye and Syria, in which people must be excavated from underneath collapsed structures and injuries tended to, is over, circumstances remain dire for the several million people affected by the earthquakes which began on February 6. One immediate problem was the freezing temperatures that so many people were exposed to, as it was still winter. Whole populations were left without proper shelter because of destruction of houses and the fear that buildings still left standing could collapse from aftershocks. Since then, hunger and disease, including a cholera outbreak spreading through over-crowded refugee camps, have been huge problems. The hospitals that survived are still filled up with sick and injured people. The affected population continues to be in dire need of aid. Plus, the earthquakes caused massive infrastructural damage, which means a whole region has to be rebuilt in order for people’s lives to be brought back to normal. There is a very large number of injured people, which means their personal recovery and rehabilitation has to be tended to.

So the rest of the world is deeply involved in mounting a huge rescue and relief response. But this is much more challenging than it usually was for disasters in the past, because of how crisis-ridden the whole world is, with two years of the coronavirus pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine and all its ripple effects. Yet most of the world’s nations have been sending help. That includes Pakistan, sending not only desperately-needed goods but also, from the very beginning, rescue teams from our own military, emergency services, and civil society organizations. Pakistanis consider this repayment for the aid that Turkey provided to Pakistan after the devastating floods of last year.

Both disasters have some significant similarities, even though earthquakes are generally a more acute kind of event than floods, with higher casualty-to-suffering ratio. For instance, the millions of people chronically displaced by the floods in Pakistan also contended with winter conditions as they struggled to survive out in the open. Many people affected by last year’s floods are still without shelter, and in some areas, floodwaters lingered for several months. The impact is mostly in Pakistan’s southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, which lie at relatively warm latitudes. But those areas did experience unusually cold temperatures this winter.

It is a good thing the flooding didn’t transpire during the colder months, because then people would be cold and wet at the same time. Unfortunately, the tremors in Turkey did, and in the coldest stage of winter (the shortest day of the year was back in December 21, but temperatures continued plummeting since then, as they do every year, because it takes time for the Earth to lose heat.) That meant millions of people were instantly thrown out into the elements without warning, and people trapped under the rubble, who often couldn’t do anything to make themselves warm, were also exposed to low temperatures. So hypothermia became a common cause of death.

While the problem in Pakistan was difficulty in getting aid far enough, in Turkey and Syria, it is difficulty in getting aid fast enough. One solution that Pakistan’s People-Led Disaster Management advocated for meeting one of the most pressing needs of our flood victims, protection from cold, is the distribution of a special thermal-insulating tent called a thermal tube tent. It reflects infrared while letting visible light through, so it keeps anybody inside it warm. The tent, when folded, fits in the palm of your hand. People often carry it along when camping and it is ideal for mass delivery to the earthquake victims of Turkey and Syria. As for people trapped under debris, it is possible that emergency responders could have found ways to get this material under the rubble to where they are so that the victims could stay warm. With people as willing to provide help, what direction they choose to put their resources into is very important.

Given that Pakistan is in a perfect storm of crises and struggling to cope, many may doubt how much help we are in a position to give the people of Turkey and Syria. Recovery from last year’s floods is still not complete, yet NDMA is busy delivering 50,000 winterized tents to Turkey and Syria. But there are benefits for our nation if we dedicate ourselves to the earthquake relief effort. For starters, when we help other nations through their crises, it becomes likely that they will later repay us by helping us with our troubles. That is the case with Turkey itself. Billboards in Islamabad calling for earthquake donations recall how Turkey helped Pakistan out in the 2022 floods.

Another thing we stand to get out of helping is a valuable learning experience. Handling a real disaster is the best way to gain the ability to cope with any crisis that may occur in the future. Because what happened in Turkey and Syria last month is one of the biggest natural disasters of the century, it offers a treasure trove of lessons, not just in handling earthquakes specifically but more broadly any humanitarian crisis. If, in addition to goods, Pakistan sent an abundance of its own people to the disaster zone, military personnel, firefighters, search and rescue professionals, doctors, nurses, etc., it will be a massive training exercise for them. We will probably have to avoid sending untrained volunteers over there to get an education in disaster management, because receiving visitors is a burden for Turkey and Syria at this time, so only the most useful people should go. But for even the most professional of workers, there is much to learn from managing a humanitarian situation of this scale.

About the author:

Raja Shahzeb Khan is an environmental activist, journalist, and director at Pakistan’s People-Led Disaster Management (PPLDM).