A boy bites his bowl as he waits for food at a roadside centre for flood victims near Nowshera, Pakistan. (Reuters)

Sukkur (Pakistan), Aug. 24 (Reuters): Pakistan could take years to recover from the floods disaster, its President said, as crisis talks began with the IMF which predicted the catastrophe would have a “major and lasting” economic impact.

President Asif Ali Zardari expressed concerns that Islamic militants will try to exploit the disorder.

“I see always such organisations and such people taking advantage of this human crisis,” Zardari said in an interview published in Britain’s Independent newspaper today. “It is again a challenge to not let them take advantage of this human crisis.”

Zardari, who triggered criticism when he went ahead with visits to meet British and French leaders and when he spent time at a family property in France as the catastrophe unfolded, defended the government’s response.

“I have my own reasons for being where I was and at what time,” Zardari said, adding that “three years is the minimum” for Pakistan to rebuild, according to the newspaper.

Mindful of the criticism levelled against the government, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said he had directed the federal health ministry “to take all measures necessary to prevent outbreaks of diseases”.

Gilani also said the government had so far distributed 200 tonnes of medicines and supplies to 2.2 million people.

An official in the province of Sindh said today that up to 600,000 people were now in danger from rising flood waters in the south, nearly a month into a calamity that has affected a third of the country and cast some 4 million from their homes.

“We are strengthening embankments but 500,000 to 600,000 people in low-lying areas are still in danger and we are trying to persuade them to leave their areas,” Sindh’s irrigation minister, Jam Saifullah Dherjo, said.

Flood victims are seething over what they say is their government's sluggish response to the floods which have wiped out villages, bridges, roads, crops, livestock and livelihoods.

Pakistan faces the daunting challenges of securing enough aid for relief efforts, making sure militants do not take advantage of the catastrophe to gain recruits and figuring out ways to dull long-term economic pain resulting from the floods.

Masood Ahmed, director of the International Monetary Fund’s West Asia and Central Asia department, said in a Reuters interview that while the catastrophe was still unfolding, it was clear the floods will have “a major and lasting impact” on a economy that was fragile before the floods struck.

Agriculture is a mainstay of the economy and at least 3.2 million hectares of crops, nearly 14 per cent of the land cultivated, have been damaged or lost, according to the UN. In the country’s northwest, 71 per cent of rice crops have been destroyed.

The UN estimates at least 660,000 people had contracted acute diarrhoea, skin and respiratory diseases and warns of the spread of fatal scourges such as cholera.