'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Community resilience to natural disasters

I've been filled with sadness reading about the effects of hurricane damage in Haiti. Some 700 people are now known to have died there in the floods and mudslides brought on by the most recent hurricanes, and a further 1,000 are missing and--I imagine--very likely also dead.

The BBC website has this info about the deadly effects of the flooding there. The flooding and mudslides were exacerbated by widespread deforestation in the country; and the casualties were magnified by the failure of the authorities to set in motion any effective evacuation of people from at-risk areas...

Those Haitians who have survived so far still face terrible circumstances. According to that piece on the BBC site:

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) estimates 175,000 people are without food, water and electricity and in need of help.

"The floodwaters were so strong in Gonaives that they have washed away the whole town," WFP Country Director Guy Gauvreau told BBC News Online.

...Severed road links and a tense security situation are hampering efforts.

The WFP said aid trucks carrying emergency food supplies had been lined up to form a makeshift bridge over the water.

But then, by contrast, there's Cuba...

In that report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, there is no mention that anyone at all died in Cuba as a result of the hurricane-related floods that also swept that nearby Caribbean nation. The OCHA report provides one reason why not:

Some 2 million people were evacuated to 2,492 shelters.

The hurricanes hit really hard in Cuba, too. But the population was far, far better organized for evacuation. (And I bet the deforestation levels there are far lower, too, meaning less severe flooding.)

Two million people evacuated! That's more than one out of every six Cubans. What a massive undertaking for any country, let alone an impoverished, "third world" nation!

Impoverished--well, yes and no... I note from the Human Development Report 2003 that in Cuba the life expectancy of a person at birth was 76.5 years. In Haiti it was 49.1 years (and in the US, 76.9 years).

So we could say that grinding poverty and chaotic, repressive political organization have sliced 27 years off the life of every Haitian, on average. Given that there are roughly 8.1 million Haitians, that is a heck of a lot of person-years of human experience and wellbeing that have been stolen from Haiti's people.

You could also say that 27 years is one-third of the longevity that each Haitian ought to be able to expect, on average. Just stolen away! When you look at the effects in each country of the most recent hurricanes, you can see just one of the hundreds of ways that this happens.