ISLAMABAD: The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced on Wednesday that it required $96 million for its early recovery programme to support an additional 430,000 farming households in 14 flood-hit districts of Pakistan over the next two years.

Despite some successes, much remains to be done to restore rural livelihoods and to significantly reduce vulnerability, improve food production and income generation, and increase the resilience of rural communities to future shocks, FAO said in a statement to mark the anniversary of last year’s devastating floods.

It said the total cost of FAO’s winter wheat intervention was around $54 million. Buying the same quantity of wheat on the local market would have cost almost four times as much.

Other interventions included assistance to women to grow vegetables in their kitchen gardens. FAO provided individual families with vegetable kits, each of which yielded an average 500kg of vegetables.

This bridged the gap before the wheat harvest in late spring and surplus production sold on the local market providing valuable income which families used to meet other basic needs.