EMERGENCY RISK REDUCTION

Although I now focus primarily on emergency mitigation and preparedness, I ‘backed into’ working in disaster settings while serving overseas as a volunteer in ‘rural development’. This was following a couple of degrees in agriculture, both teaching it in high school after a Batchelor’s at Clemson, and co-oping as an irrigation engineer while finishing a Masters at Texas A&M.

My youthful desire to see a bit of the world, a fascination with other cultures, and an ag background proved a fairly marketable mix. Since most of the poor citizens of countries overseas carry out small farming, the term ‘rural development’ generally means ‘agricultural development’. Therefore I gravitated to this.

It didn’t take too many visits to countries such as Haiti, Ethiopia, and Bolivia to notice that agricultural development wasn’t as easy as it seemed, or at least that I had studied. There are many of what we sometimes call ‘structural barriers’.  These may be economic, political, cultural, etc. In other words, there may not be simply a technical reason, i.e. drought or poor soil, for a country to be agriculturally underdeveloped.

I saw this first while serving in three refugee camps during the terrible Ethiopian famine of 1984-85. Some of us remember the emaciated faces and bodies, and yes, it was as bad as it looked on the news. The story was a drought in Ethiopia, but the back story was export-oriented governmental policies that resulted in low grain prices for peasant farmers, who in turn planted less, which emptied the strategic grain reserves, resulting in an economy teetering on the edge of a tragedy. This occurred when the seasonal rainfall was less than normal.

Weather patterns are always cyclical. (Maybe you recall one of my recent blogs.) Therefore I am convinced that the 1984 famine was primarily human-induced. Perhaps not intentionally, but nevertheless, manmade.  A more obvious example of human-induced food insecurity would be civil war, which I have witnessed in such spots as Liberia, Somalia, Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, and Kosovo.  In fact, most countries in which I have served have witnessed disaster impacts of the human-induced nature rather than the natural. As in Ethiopia, it is sometimes covered in the veneer of natural, but with a bit of deeper scratch, the reality becomes more evident.

There generally is a greater outpouring of aid to countries that have been impacted by natural disasters, such as a Sumatra, Indonesia (tsunami), Haiti (earthquake), or Myanmar (cyclone). For this reason, these countries tend to emphasize the natural nature of the disaster, rather than what might be some significant human contributing factors. Because so many innocents suffer in either scenario, should this matter in our giving? Even if it doesn’t, I think it’s wise to look beneath the veneer, toward some durable solutions in an increasingly troubled world.

Thanks for reading.