Whilst huge numbers of people are continuing to flee from Swat Valley and other conflict-hit areas in North West Frontier Province (NWFP), a few are heading back in the other direction to tend to their crops.

“We just left our house and animals as they were and fled last week. But now we must try and get back and harvest the wheat crop which will rot in the fields if we don’t tend to it,” said Hazir Gul, 50, a farmer from a village near Ambala in Buner District.

“The wheat crop is the main source of livelihood for my family. It provides the ‘atta’ [wheat flour] we eat as well. I can’t afford to have it go to waste or my family will go hungry,” Gul told IRIN.

Adnan Khan, a spokesman for the NWFP government’s Emergency Response Unit, said: “Hundreds of families are now going back to Buner, and a few places in Swat.”

Provincial Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) “could exceed 2.5 million”, and Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Geneva, has said the number of those who have fled their homes since August 2008 “exceeds the two million mark”. The figure includes 1.45 million displaced since 2 May, when fresh fighting broke out between militants and government forces.

Rashid Khalikov, director of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York, has described the situation as “one of the worst displacement crises”, while appealing for more funds.

“People here are desperately worried about the future, the fate of their houses and land. This is adding to their trauma,” Omar Hamid, a volunteer working at camps in Mardan (in NWFP), told IRIN. Many of the families currently living in camps are desperately poor in the first place, and have no financial cushion.

“I lost my job as a kitchen assistant at a hotel in Mingora three years ago, due to the collapse of tourism in the area. Since then we have barely been able to make ends meet on an income of under Rs 3,000 a month [US$38] which I earn by selling eggs or doing occasional jobs in a shop. I don’t know how we will manage now,” said Amin Khan, now living in Peshawar.