Pakistan Granted British Trade Concessions to Help Quake Effort

Britain has granted trade concessions to Pakistan to aid recovery from the earthquake that has inflicted some £2.9bn of damage, the country's high commission revealed yesterday.

The news emerged at a meeting in London addressed by Cherie Blair, who compared the disaster to the Asian tsunami and warned there was now "a race against time" to help those left homeless above the Himalayan snowline. The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, has complained that the international humanitarian response has been inadequate.

"The official death toll is already at 70,000 and rising," the prime minister's wife told aid and development workers. "There are hundreds of thousands of people who having survived the earthquake are now at risk of disease, lack of food and the biting cold. Pakistan has suffered a disaster as serious as the tsunami which shook the world at the begining of the year. It's not an easy job to get to these people. You can't just send in a helicopter on a whim ... This is not something we can transform overnight. We have to be there for the long haul. Widows and orphans will need help not just in the weeks and months ahead but for years to come."

Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan's high commissioner, said that her country was "on the brink of another wave of deaths and misery if we do not act fast enough" and that assessments indicated that the earthquake had caused more than £2.9bn worth of damage. "We are grateful for the trade concessions that we are getting [from Britain]," Ms Lodhi said. "We are hopeful that the EU will respond and help Pakistan trade its way through the crisis."