The Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC), La Via Campesina’s member in the country, has expressed deep concern over the devastating floods sweeping across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan, Kashmir, and parts of Punjab and Sindh.

Since the monsoon began in late June, nearly 800 people have died in flash floods and glacial lake outbursts triggered by heavy rains. Roads, villages, farmland, and livestock have been washed away, displacing thousands. According to the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the dead include 200 children, 117 women, and 471 men. Over 1,000 people are injured. More than 4,700 homes have been damaged or destroyed, and over 5,450 livestock lost.

For small farmers, the destruction is catastrophic—wiping out seed stocks, crops, and animals, and threatening both current harvests and future planting. PKRC emphasizes that it is again peasants, sharecroppers, landless workers, and rural women who are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did not create.

In Buner and Swat, entire villages were swept away within minutes. In South Punjab, cotton, rice, and mango crops lie underwater. In Gilgit-Baltistan, terraces and irrigation channels have collapsed. Many remain missing, and the toll on homes, infrastructure, and livelihoods continues to rise.

Despite contributing less than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan remains on the frontlines of climate breakdown. The northern mountains—home to over 7,000 glaciers, the largest ice reserves outside the poles—are a key water source.

But rising temperatures are accelerating glacier melt, increasing the risk of floods from glacial lake outbursts. Meanwhile, heatwaves over the Indian Ocean are intensifying monsoon rains, making floods more frequent and severe. This year’s extreme weather is not an isolated event—it is climate-amplified.

PKRC stresses that the scale of devastation is not “natural” but a result of decades of state neglect and corporate-driven policies. Instead of investing in early warning systems, embankments, and rural infrastructure, successive governments and the military elite have prioritized mega-canals, export-oriented farming, and corporate agribusiness projects under the Green Pakistan Initiative. These choices have left rural communities exposed and unprotected. Relief efforts remain slow, top-down, and exclusionary, sidelining those most affected.

PKRC insists that relief alone is not enough – and what’s needed is justice: land redistribution, recognition of peasant rights, and a calibrated but definitive break from fossil fuel–dependency and corporate-controlled development.

The union has called on all progressive forces—political parties, labor unions, women’s movements, and international allies—to support peasants in demanding a new social contract rooted in land rights, food sovereignty, climate justice, and dignity.