Rebuilding Pakistan after the worst floods in decades could take five years, and foreign donors are in danger of reacting too slowly, a top Red Cross official has said.
"Crops are gone. Infrastructure is gone, including canals. Community canals. Irrigation canals. To bring that back is going to take a long time. It could end up being five years," said Bekele Geleta, Secretary-General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
The floods have affected 20 million people, killed up to 1,600 and left two million homeless. Popular anger is rising fast.
Geleta said the international community must not measure the urgency of the disaster by the death toll, and that only a quarter of the required emergency aid had arrived.
Swollen by torrential monsoon rains, major rivers have flooded Pakistan's mountain valleys and fertile plains, wiping out villages and destroying bridges and roads. An area roughly the size of Italy is affected.
But only a quarter of the $459 million aid needed for initial relief has arrived, according to the United Nations, which has warned of a second wave of deaths among the 6 million people who still need food, shelter and water and medicine.
