The Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC) expresses deep concern and outrage at the ongoing devastation caused by the 2025 floods across northern regions in Punjab Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Kashmir & Sindh. Once again, it is peasants, small-scale food producers, sharecroppers, landless workers, and rural women who are paying the heaviest price for a crisis they did not create.

Massive Losses, Unequal Burdens

Since late June, unprecedented monsoon cloudbursts and glacial hazards have triggered deadly flash floods and landslides. Entire villages were swept away within minutes in Buner and Swat; South Punjab’s cotton, rice, and mango crops stand submerged; and in GB, terraces and irrigation channels have collapsed.

More than 1100 lives have been lost, hundreds remain missing, and thousands of homes, roads, and bridges destroyed. National figures confirm over 10,000 livestock deaths. For small farmers, the disaster has wiped out their seed stocks, crops, and animals—destroying both immediate harvests and future planting. 

A Disaster Made by Climate Injustice and State Neglect

Pakistan contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions but is once again on the frontlines of climate collapse. These extreme floods are climate-amplified, fueled by warming-driven intense rainfall and glacial lake outburst risks.

But the scale of destruction is not “natural.” It is the direct result of decades of state neglect, broken priorities, and neoliberal policies. Instead of investing in early-warning systems, embankments, and flood-resilient rural infrastructure, successive governments and the military elite have diverted resources to mega-canals, corporate farming zones, export crops, built housing societies on the path of rivers and military-led agribusiness projects under the Green Pakistan Initiative.

Ravi Urban Development (RUDA), a maga housing scheme on oblast 100,000 acre of land on both sides of River Ravi, played an important part in drowning almost 1/6^th of Lahore under water. The land from small farmers was acquired forcefully using a colonial law that still exists.

These choices leave peasants unprotected while public wealth is funneled into corporate schemes. Relief and recovery measures remain slow, top-down, and exclusionary, once again abandoning the rural poor.

The 2025 floods are not an accident of nature. They are the outcome of state neglect, elite greed, and global capitalist exploitation. Each time, it is peasants and rural workers who lose everything, while those responsible enrich themselves. Relief alone is not enough. What is required is justice: redistribution of land and resources, recognition of peasant rights, and a decisive break from fossil fuel–driven, corporate-controlled models of development.

Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC) calls on all progressive forces—political parties, labour groups, women’s movements, and international allies—to stand with peasants in demanding a new social contract rooted in land, popular agrarian reforms, food sovereignty, dignity, and climate justice.

Farooq Tariq
Qammar Abbas

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Press Conference Lahore Press Club, 1^st October 2025

• Rich countries must immediately provide at least 10 billion dollars to Pakistan as aid.

• Foreign debt repayments should be suspended for five years, and the money should be spent on flood-affected communities.

• The floods have exposed the flaws in IMF policies.

• Corporate farming should be abolished, and the land of public-sector agricultural farms should be given to the tenants.

• Flood-affected farmers should be provided with immediate cash support, and their debts should be cancelled.

Dear Journalists,

This is to bring to your attention the situation of small farmers and landless peasantry affected by the successive devastating floods, especially the one that just ended. The floods that began in June 2022 and were repeated this year have created losses and damage that run into billions of dollars. One estimate is that around 16.3 billion US dollars are needed to overcome the damage caused by the flood in such areas as rehabilitation, resilient housing, livelihoods and infrastructure.

The floods have affected tens of millions of people; official and UN assessments put the number of people affected at roughly 33 million. These people have lost homes, livelihoods and access to basic services. The economic hit has not been evenly spread. One major assessment shows Sindh alone bore roughly 70% of total losses and damages in the 2022 floods, while Punjab has suffered heavy agricultural and infrastructure damage in this year’s flooding, probably the worst in the history of the province.

Flood-affected farmers in Sindh and Punjab face crop losses and destroyed irrigation networks. Many were already indebted; without debt relief, they cannot replant, buy inputs, or recover livelihoods prolonging food insecurity and unemployment. Pakistan’s fiscal situation, on the other hand, severely limits its ability to respond to these damages. In the current budget cycle, the government has allocated roughly $16.3 billion US dollars for domestic and external debt servicing nearly 47% of the federal budget leaving extraordinarily little fiscal space for large-scale rehabilitation and public investment required to cope with the flood damage.

With large slices of revenue committed to debt servicing, provincial and federal governments lack the counter-cyclical fiscal room to roll out large cash transfers, resilient housing programs, and reconstruction.

At scale this slows relief and deepens suffering. Slow rehabilitation, in turn, leads to protracted displacement, higher health and education losses, and ultimately a higher price-tag for ’building back better. That larger bill will fall back on an already indebted state unless external grants and debt measures are adopted now.

The floods have exposed policies being dictated by the World Bank and the IMF. These policies have led to reduced social development budgets and cuts in investments on major social safety nets for the people. This is even though flood crisis demands more social spending, specifically on infrastructure for public welfare including education, healthcare and housing. This is high time that Pakistan demands an immediate suspension of policies being dictated by these foreign lenders and, instead, increase its spending on the rehabilitation of its flood affected citizens.

This is a high time to demand a robust climate finance mechanism and climate-related investment in the form of loss and damage funds by international lenders and Pakistanis multilateral development partners so that Pakistan could respond to this crisis effectively.

National debt sustainability assessments from the Finance Ministry and international financial institutions warn that Pakistan’s fragile debt position constrains emergency fiscal measures and long-term resilience investments. This is why international grants, debt relief and concessional climate finance are urgently needed for post flood reconstruction and revival. We still deserve the recovery of our losses and damages since we have played extraordinarily little role in creating the climate crisis.

Keeping in view the above-mentioned situation: Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee demands:

We demand immediate suspension of foreign debt repayments for Pakistan for at least five years to free fiscal space for disaster relief, reconstruction and revival.

We demand new non-debt creating public climate finance for reconstruction and revival not new and loans to cover the USD 16.3 billion priority recovery plan identified by national and UN assessments. These finances must target resilient housing, irrigation, and livelihood support.

We also demand that targeted cash transfers and debt relief for smallholder farmers in Punjab and Sindh so they can re-enter production in the next season (seed, fertilizer, small machinery grants; waive interest on agricultural loans for affected districts).

We also demand the setting up of the transparent, accountable ’Reconstruction and Resilience Fund with civilian oversight, liking provincial development allocations to damage assessments, and ensuring guaranteed share for Sindh and Punjab proportional to verified losses.

We also demand that IMF and multilateral lenders allow flexibility in their conditionalities for their ongoing loan programs these conditionalities must not block social spending on disaster-related reconstruction and revival needs; they should support a climate-resilience lending window with highly concessional terms.

We demand an end to corporate farming and support land redistribution to the tenants who are cultivating the public sector farms for over 100 years.

We demand the fixation of minimum support price for wheat, rice, sugar cane and cotton in the initial stage of their sowing.

These measures will restore confidence of the farmers to grow more and thus bring Pakistan out of a forthcoming food and agriculture crises unforeseen earlier.

Press Conference by:

Farooq Tariq
General Secretary Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee

For more information contact:

Qammar Abbas
Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee

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