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Plenty's work with the Toledo Ecotourism Association in Belize continues to grow.
photo by Anita Whipple
| Contents:
A Message from Peter Schweitzer, Plenty's Executive Director |
November 22, 1998
Dear Friends of Plenty,
On Tuesday, October 22, in the town of Punta Gorda, southern Belize, on the coast of the normally tranquil Caribbean, Plenty soy technician, Gomier Longville and I were nailing plywood over the windows of our office and soy center, 75 feet from the gently lapping surf. We had been hearing about a monster hurricane, with another of those disarmingly unthreatening names, "Mitch." Shouldn't they start calling these things Adolph, Genghis, or Jack the Ripper? Somehow, "Mitch," "Fifi," "Gilbert," and "Georges" don't carry enough sense of impending disaster. But we were on the alert, as was the entire country of Belize. Hurricane watchers, studying their computer models predicted that Mitch was headed right for us and would be landing in our face sometime the next day. By now shelters were
being identified in town, but advisories cautioned against staying on the coast. "You have a 90% better chance of surviving a hurricane of this magnitude if you move inland." Rahul and Erika, two Plenty volunteers were renting an apartment in a massive concrete building, 25 feet above sea level, which is where we moved all our computers, files and books. While we put soy center appliances up on blocks, we were well aware that if this hurricane hit us with category 5 winds and sea surge, our office and soy center would end up somewhere out beyond the cayes with the barracuda and conch. As I drove through town that afternoon, I thought there might not be much left of Punta Gorda in a couple days. Most houses are low and made of wood. Most people were not planning to go anywhere. They would wait it out.
Poor people are more fatalistic about death than people of means. "If it's my time, then there's little I can do about it," they will say. I remember when we had a Plenty office in Washington, DC and Three Mile Island was having meltdown of unknown proportions. We were close enough to Harrisburg that we were aware that if she blew, we would be in radiation soup. We had all our vehicles' gas tanks topped off, ready to flee. Our neighbors, on the other hand, mostly African Americans and Mexican immigrants, ignored the excitement and went about their business as usual. If anything, they seemed to party a bit louder and later into the night, but otherwise, they ignored the information that kept us tuned in to the radio on the edge of our seats.
Northern Belize was a bit more responsive to impending Mitch than Punta Gorda. Seventy-five thousand people evacuated the coastal towns and villages and Belize City and moved into the center of the country, crowded into shelters with pets and a few belongings. Many of them were there for four days before the all clear was sounded.
Meanwhile, Mitch sat on the coast of Honduras like a murderous, ill-tempered intruder who refuses to leave and then, unpredictably, moved into Honduras to dump its cargo of torrential rain, enormous amounts of water that had been brought all the way from Africa. If you saw satellite photos of this storm, you realize what a monstrous beast it was. Thousands of people lost their lives in floods and mudslides. The cost in crops and agricultural land is yet to be determined, but after the immediate emergencies are tended to, food shortages will be among the problems for years to come.
When an earthquake ravaged Guatemala in 1976, killing 23,000 people and leaving a million homeless, the disaster was made personal for us because of the first-hand reports we were getting from the scene over our ham radio. This time, the disaster was made personal because we had family and friends in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala who were directly affected.
While calamities like hurricanes and earthquakes are "acts of God," and beyond our human abilities to prevent, grinding poverty is centuries old and not immune to human intervention. One of the things that you will be hearing more about in the aftermath of Mitch is how many of the deaths were preventable, because many of the floods and mudslides were made far worse by the deforestation that, in recent years, is costing Honduras and Nicaragua hundreds of thousands of acres of forest cover every year. The culprits are mainly foreign logging and the big banana industry and, increasingly, slash and burn agriculture and the cutting of trees for firewood. Driving these culprits is the underlying destructive force we can identify simply as poverty. These are countries with post-colonial economies and backbreaking mountains of debt to international lenders forced to cough up their natural resources just to survive. They have little to offer the industrial pipers other than their land and trees which, besides being essential to their self-sufficiency and environmental health, also happen to be some of the only defenses against floods and mudslides.
In the beginning, Plenty described itself as a "relief and development agency." Since the Guatemala earthquake, Plenty's work is more accurately described as "development," usually preceded by the adjective "alternative" to differentiate from, say, a corporation draining wetlands to build condos, or the World Bank laying down roads across the Amazon rainforest. "Relief" is what the Red Cross and the US Army do better than most. I still remember the Chinook helicopters in Guatemala ferrying food and potable water to remote villages cut off from vehicle traffic because roads or bridges were destroyed. In fact, one could make a compelling argument for turning the US military into the world's most effective emergency relief organization (right after nations give up war as a means of solving disputes).
We have endless admiration for the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Army Corps of Engineers working heroically on the frontlines of the most dreadful natural and man-made disasters that occur. We should spare no expense to make sure they have the tools and resources to do this work. Plenty, on the other hand, is not equipped for relief work. Our role is to help mitigate the disasters before they happen. We can do this if we contribute to creating alternatives to selling the forests for survival and turning the land into chemical-drenched, erosion-prone banana plantations. This is the focus of our work in Central America and, although Mitch has made that work more difficult, we can only hope that governments and corporations pick up on this absolutely essential lesson: the wise bird doesn't cut the tree limb its nest is sitting on.
In the short term, however, Plenty cannot ignore some of the immediate needs in the wake of the hurricane. We will focus our response on efforts directly supporting the communities and organizations we have already been working with. Casta Calderon is the Nicaraguan wife of Plenty Board Member and Soy Technician, Chuck Haren. They will be traveling to Guatemala and Nicaragua in December to assess the situation and help guide Plenty's response. We have set up a fund within Plenty for those who would like to contribute to this response. Most likely, it will be focused on helping rebuild the food supply by assisting farmers to reclaim their fields for planting. There will be an urgent need for seed and equipment that was lost to the flooding. The agricultural base of Honduras and Nicaragua will take years to recover, and we would recommend that these nations seriously consider phasing out two industries that they can no longer afford if they want to guard against more and worse disasters in the future, specifically, the big banana export industry and foreign-controlled logging. Plenty will continue to encourage and support the efforts of farmers to move away from slash and burn agriculture to more organic, environmentally-friendly methods of growing food. And we will continue to assist the development of more sustainable, local, community-based economies.
I want to take a minute to thank you, our donors and supporters, friends, partners and volunteers. Some of you are all of those, but every one of you is essential to keeping Plenty alive, engaged and effective. When we count our blessings, we start with you.
Sincerely,
Peter Schweitzer
Executive Director