Pakistan is facing a fight that doesn't grab headlines these days.It's a fight over the future of the country's increasingly scarce supply of water. The World Bank is warning that the very viability of the nation is at stake. Laura Lynch reports from the Indus River delta.
Quereshi: “The sand dunes, they are extending right from the upper stream to the Arabian Sea.
Lynch: “So the mighty Indus river is mighty no more?”
Quereshi: “Absolutely, it's not a river, it's a small canal…”
On the sandy banks of the Indus near the village of Darwish, a man stacks firewood cut from nearby trees onto a donkey cart. Firewood has replaced fish and produce as the main harvest here now.
Huge volumes of water are drawn off upstream-mostly for agriculture, but also for Pakistan's booming cities. And people downstream are left with nothing.
one in four people here are left, the rest have gone to find work in the city. There was a time when we had so much help we could fill up our Datsun truck full of fish