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Anthropology and the Environment
April 1999
Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor
In our continuing series on anthropology's relevance to environmental management, this month's column features an insightful look at a recent environmental disaster in Central America, and more generally at the social production of vulnerability to hazards.
Just a quick reminder: May 1 deadlines are approaching rapidly for the Section's Logo Design Contest ($100 prize) and the Second Annual Roy A. Rappaport Student Paper competition ($500 prize). Send your artwork submittals (any media) and 5 copies of student papers to Carole Crumley (UNC-Chapel Hill, crumley@unc.edu).
Environment and Disaster in Honduras: The Social Construction of Hurricane Mitch
By Anthony Oliver-Smith, University of Florida
Hurricane Mitch, which severely affected much of the nation of Honduras and parts of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Belize and Guatemala during the week of October 27 of last year, exemplifies the volatility and danger inherent in human induced environmental changes when combined with the forces of nature. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and other environmental forces do not constitute disasters until they come into contact with human communities. As hurricanes go, Mitch did not pack unusually fierce winds after it finally made landfall along the Honduran coast. In fact, it was soon downgraded to a tropical storm as it passed over most of Central America. However, the combination of the storm's wind and rain with the region's socially produced patterns of vulnerability converted a natural phenomenon into a disaster of historic proportions. The disaster that Hurricane Mitch became was in large measure produced by human social, economic and environmental policies and practices.
After hovering off the coast of Honduras for several days, absorbing enormous volumes of water from the ocean, Mitch, although diminished in wind speed, followed a path that took it over Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, dropping as much as six feet of rain in some areas of Honduras. The intense rainfall caused major flooding in lowland areas, and river basins and produced devastating landslides on deforested hill and mountainsides. The scale and power of the floods were so great that new maps must be drawn to reflect the new configuration of terrain in some areas in Honduras. Estimates of the dead approach 10,000 for the entire region and 6,600 for Honduras alone. In addition, some 8,000 have been counted as missing. Some two million people were left homeless and estimates of the number of people who will require resettlement range from 100,000 to one million. All told, about three million people were affected. The damage to housing, agriculture and infrastructure was widespread and the destruction of roads, bridges, electrical plants and networks, water and sewage services, communication systems, and schools was extensive and almost total in some regions. Total losses for the region are estimated at roughly six billion dollars. Loss estimates for Honduras, in particular, are nearly US$4 billion.
Hurricane Mitch was not only an event of catastrophic proportions, but is also a continually unfolding process. The dramatic scenes of death and destruction are only the first chapter in the evolution of this disaster. Roughly one month after the hurricane, the government was forced to declare a medical emergency. Rainfall and flooding left large areas totally inundated in standing freshwater, provoking serious outbreaks of disease including 30,000 cases of malaria, 20,000 cases of cholera and 200,000 cases of amoebic dysentery. Difficulties in re-establishing communications and road connections with some areas left many communities with no access to medical assistance to combat these threats. The death toll of Hurricane Mitch grew daily, many weeks after the initial impact.
The disaster continues on as well in the form of economic effects that inhibit the capacity of the people and the nation to recuperate. As well as sweeping away homes and villages, flood waters also destroyed commercial and industrial sites, depositing a wide variety of chemicals and toxic materials in the soils and aquifers of certain areas and in marine environments such as the Gulf of Fonseca. The true extent of contamination has yet to be determined. Vast areas of agricultural lands were flooded, destroying at least 50% of many current crops. Coffee, Honduras' major export crop, suffered a loss of 20% of this year's harvest, but actual losses are greater because the damage to roads and bridges has prevented both labor from getting to crops and getting crops out to market if they can be harvested. The banana plantations in the northern regions close to the coast were completely flooded, reducing production to roughly 5% of normal and creating as much as 80% unemployment for the next two years in that major industry. Shrimp farm production ponds were both inundated and contaminated, severely reducing the nation's third largest export earner. Hillside agricultural land was stripped of topsoil by rainfall and landslides and many valley bottom lands of both large and small farmers have been buried under deep layers of sand and sediment and may require years to bring back into production. These agricultural production and infrastructure losses are devastating in terms of the ability of the national economy to recover. In addition, the massive unemployment in the agricultural sector will severely impede the capacity of individuals and households to recuperate themselves. Economic recovery at all levels, even with enormous international aid, will consume decades.
Hurricane Mitch, as both event and on-going process, obliges recognition of the human contribution to these tragic outcomes and conditions. A political ecological perspective on Hurricane Mitch reveals that the devastation and continuing misery of the disaster are far more the product of the unresolved social, economic and environmental problems of a distorted development process than of the wind and rain of a tropical storm. The poverty and vulnerability in which large numbers of people live in Central America are socially produced effects of long-standing social and economic policies and practices. Such policies and practices have also produced a variety of profound environmental impacts that compound economic and social vulnerabilities and intensity the effects of disaster.
In Honduras, widespread inequities in the distribution of land have produced waves of migration to cities, such as Tegucigalpa, where people are forced to live in unsafe structures on hillsides made unstable by deforestation. Land concentration in rural areas for melon, banana, and cattle production has produced wealth for a few and displaced thousands to hillsides they must deforest to plant subsistence crops for daily survival. Draining wetlands and diking rivers in lowland valleys for extensive plantations of export crops attracted thousands, now homeless and jobless after Mitch, to work for agribusiness in areas acutely vulnerable to flooding. In the final analysis, disasters are increasingly the outcomes of land use patterns, settlement policies, population densities and environmental changes that place people and livelihoods at risk. When these patterns of vulnerability are combined with a natural or technological agent such as Hurricane Mitch, tragedy is the inevitable result.
Send your Section news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com, 206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005). And check the Anthropology/Environment web site regularly.