The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer
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Many people in the New Zealand governance system are well versed in earthquake hazard assessment. The island country experiences many earthquakes, and people there have learned a lot about how to make buildings earthquake resistant. In fact, almost everyone trained in seismology anywhere in the world has studied the earthquakes of New Zealand. The nation has very stringent building codes and strict enforcement. After every quake, no matter how small, buildings are inspected and their safety is assessed. Unsafe buildings are closed until they are properly repaired and have passed inspection or are torn down. In 2013, New Zealand tied with Denmark as the least corrupt place in the world, as rated by Transparency International.26 Haiti ranked number 163 of 177 countries rated. For comparison, the United States came in nineteenth, tied with Uruguay.
It is important to recognize that buildings collapse and people die in well-governed countries with almost no corruption and in highly corrupt countries with almost no governance. There is little doubt that many fewer buildings typically collapse during earthquake disasters in advanced countries than in poor places. We can hope that what happened at Rana Plaza is an extreme outlier, but there can be little doubt that other buildings of the same sort are ready to fall at the slightest tremor and that tens of thousands of people—perhaps millions, as geological sciences professor Roger Bilham suggests—risk their lives by working in them or visiting them for school, shopping, or any of the most common acts of daily life. Corruption in the building industry is a major problem, but it is wrong to point the finger of blame at corrupt officials every time a building collapses and people are killed in an earthquake.
The bottom line is this: Earthquakes cannot be predicted, so the best thing any country can do is understand how prone it is to quakes, how likely large quakes might be, how the risks are distributed, and how strong the ground is and then not build in risky places. If there is no chance to restrict areas for development, then the strength of built structures in risky areas should be assessed. Any built structures that can be made stronger should be, especially schools and bridges. But because doing so can be very expensive, abandoning the most unsafe structures may be required.
Now compare the maps in figures 2.1 and 2.2 with that of cyclone tracks in figure 2.5. There might seem to be a strong case that cyclones have a role in determining poverty levels, but it is not wholly convincing at this coarse level of analysis. Atlantic hurricanes primarily affect the Caribbean and southern United States. Those states (and Washington, DC) are the poorest by far in the United States. Latin America is on the whole progressing fairly well economically, but the Caribbean region is doing less well, with Haiti the leading example of economic struggle. The Central American countries are poor as well and are impacted by numerous natural hazards—hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic activity. The Philippines sits at the dead center of where Pacific typhoons reach their maximum strength; it is also a poor country compared to its neighbors, which are less impacted by typhoons.
Tropical cyclones are, after all, tropical in their geography. As Sachs and Nordhaus have pointed out, tropical regions are the least productive in the world.27 Tropical cyclones rarely reach into the temperate, most productive parts of the world. Look at the maps in figure 2.1, and you will see that much economic activity is coastal in its distribution. The reason is that it is much easier to manage trade from the coast than from inland. Many of the world’s greatest cities are on the coastal outlets of rivers, which allow goods produced inland to be shipped easily to port. New York on the Hudson and London on the Thames are leading examples.
Of course, scholars might argue that there many reasons why these countries and states have evolved to different levels of development, including important factors like the legacy of colonial rule. Proneness to cyclone strikes might well be part of the reason for the uneven distribution of wealth, but it would be hard to make the case that it is the reason.
But, as in the case for earthquakes, that’s not so much the point. Cyclones will keep happening, just as earthquakes will. But with climate change we can expect cyclones to change their strength distribution to include more cyclones in the highest category and to range farther to the north and the south. People will continue to live in places prone to cyclone strikes because of the advantages those areas offer and will do their best to improve their own welfare. The best thing cyclone-prone societies can do is understand the risks as much as possible, try not to build in the most hazardous places, and provide protections in places that are already populated. Protections here don’t mean structural features of buildings but rather seawalls and other barriers to withstand storm surges. The strategy is essentially the same as for earthquake: assess the physical risks, then protect or move.
There is a problem here, and it is not trivial. It goes back to the maps in figure 2.1 and what they tell us. As noted, these maps indicate both where wealth is produced and where science is produced. There is almost nowhere in Africa, except in South Africa, where someone can obtain a PhD in seismology or climatology. Some countries on the continent have never registered a patent for anything (a measure often used to judge scientific acumen), and many of these countries lack the institutional structure to issue patents anyway. The same is true for Haiti, which has one seismologist. What results is that there is little local notion of the risks that poor countries face based on the work of their own scientists.
The paradox is that scientists working in relatively safe places like Europe, where earthquake and cyclone risks are low, know more about risks to poor countries than people in those countries know themselves. The largess of wealthy countries is needed to provide poor countries with information about their risks, to help train local scientists, and to set up monitoring networks, but typically funds are hard to come by.
There is only one working seismometer in Myanmar, and it is over 50 years old. There was only one in Gujarat, India, when the Bhuj earthquake struck in 2001, killing perhaps 20,000 people. In the wake of that earthquake, and with the help of funds from the Asian Development Bank, an Institute of Seismological Research was established in Gandhinagar; a network of 60 seismometers and 54 strong motion accelerograms has been set up as well.28 In a decade or so of recording, Gujarat will have a much improved idea of its seismic risks.
The fact that poor countries have few, if any, seismometers typically is not due to poor governance. Myanmar had established a larger (though still inadequate) network in the 1960s. The seismometers were donated by the United States, Japan, or China, and all but one fell into disuse during Myanmar’s period of military rule.
Many poorer countries have much higher priorities than determining their earthquake risks. For example, in poor tropical countries, malaria typically kills many more people annually than do earthquakes. Death comes from poor-quality water more often than from the shaking of the ground, so the national priority should be to clean up the water supply. More souls would be saved per dollar spent on water improvement than on earthquake engineering.
A similar scenario applies to cyclones—in fact, to most natural disasters. Superstorm Sandy may have been a perfect storm in many meteorologically interesting ways, but it was close to a perfectly predicted storm as well. All forms of media provided constant warnings for days in advance, evacuation protocols were determined, and people were moved out of low-lying areas. There was considerable storm surge damage, especially to beachfront towns, and power was lost in many inland regions for four days or more. Transportation systems were interrupted for much longer. Many people were inconvenienced, but relatively few were killed. Using Red Cross data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the total number of fatalities in the United States at 117. New York suffered more deaths than other states. Many who died drowned in their homes in areas where evacuation orders had been issued. This was also the case for seafront residents of Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina came ashore in 2005. The death toll would likely have been around half
the total had everyone been willing or able to heed the evacuation orders. Compared to the many millions of people who experienced the storm, 117 deaths is a tiny number. Statistically it could be treated as effectively a zero fatality event—completely characteristic of a disaster in a rich country. A storm like Sandy would certainly have killed many more people had it made landfall in a place like Bangladesh, the country that may hold the all-time record for cyclone fatalities.
Generally, poor nations have much less access to disaster-related information, and even if they have access, the information itself or its dissemination is compromised in some way.29
The result? In poorer countries, an elite few with higher education and an ability to be part of a global community of scientists, or educated enough to know how to understand scientific information, know the risks they and others face. They also know how to protect themselves and have the means to do so. They know when a warning to evacuate makes sense and probably make their own decisions anyway. They can build strong houses on strong ground. They would never allow their houses to be built below standard.
Members of that elite may be part of the government or they may not be, but either way they control wealth and political power. The massive inequality in wealth across the globe and within countries—which, as discussed in chapter 1, determines the highly variable outcomes of disasters—is matched and exceeded by the massive inequality in the natural science–based knowledge of the dangers people face in risk-prone places. And just as the chasm between the natural and social sciences discussed earlier creates a void that can be filled and exploited by scienciness, those who have knowledge can exploit knowledge inequalities for their own profit. Poor people in poor countries generally know the least and thus are most at risk both during and after disaster events. Which brings us to Haiti, the focus of the next chapter.
Chapter 3
Carnage in the Caribbean, Chaos in Concepción
In Haiti, profiteering is part of everyday life. It takes many forms, depending on where the profiteer fits within the society’s structure. In 2010, there were two very different ways of life in Haiti. And those two ways life changed (or ended) when an earthquake shook the capital, Port-au-Prince, senseless on the twelfth day of that year.
In his book The Big Truck That Went By,1 Jonathan Katz devotes a chapter to describing the two classes in Haiti—blan and neg. Blan derives from “white,” but it is used to mean “foreigner” regardless of skin color; neg, though derived from “Negro” or “black person,” is less related to skin color than to class. The neg are the lowermost class. It’s a them-and-us distinction that Katz describes as the “cardinal division of Haitian society.” You are part of one or the other, and there is no movement between the two and no mixing.
The blan is made up of a very small group of wealthy people who run most of the businesses in Haiti. At the time of the quake, if you were part of that elite, you lived extremely well by any global standard. If you were in this group, you were probably not Haitian by birth and you may not have had Haitian nationality; more likely you were French, Lebanese, Syrian, or German.
As one of the elite, you probably lived in the lush enclave of Pétionville, in a large mansion behind a strong high gate and protected by high walls topped with razor wire, broken glass, or steel spikes. You also had high levels of personal security—armed guards. The razor wire or broken glass on those high walls would be the main clue that, although you lived very well yourself, you lived well in a very poor country where the great majority did not live well at all. Those were the people the walls were meant to keep out.
Gated communities with high protective walls as barricades are hardly unique to Haiti; they are common in almost all major cities in Africa and Latin America and in many other places, the United States being no exception. You can sometimes mistake them for prison walls meant to keep people in, but they are meant to keep people out.
If you were living behind the wall in Haiti, you were certainly connected to the government in some way, even if quite indirectly. Many of the top government officials were your neighbors. The business you had, legal or illegal, relied on an almost complete lack of regulation and government oversight. You may have paid taxes in Haiti but probably not, and if you did it was a trivial amount. You didn’t comply with labor laws, and you didn’t provide your workers with decent wages or benefits. You may have been a government crony. And whether you were or not, you saw the government as a sort of theater of the absurd because it was so completely nonfunctional. The outcome of elections mattered little because the government didn’t really govern. You had no interest in seeing effective government. A functioning government would charge taxes on business profits and impose regulations that governed how workers were paid and should be treated. That wasn’t in your interest. The government led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, champion of democracy and the poor, was threatening to you because it might have imposed such regulations. For that reason, it was never allowed to function.
So you profited from the fact that nothing functions well in Haiti, especially the government.
In 1994, while Jean-Bertrand Aristide was still in exile after one of the coups that ousted him, the US ambassador to Haiti called your group the “morally repugnant elite.”2 You thought that was funny and joked about it with others in the elite, using the acronym MRE to refer to yourselves.
The other class in Haitian society in the first days of 2010 was comprised of the people in the overwhelmingly poor and overwhelmingly numerous lower group—the 99-plus percent who lived down the hill from the elite. If you lived that life, you lived in the slums of Port-au-Prince or in the destitute farming communities of the interior of the country, where poverty is at its worst. Your home was not much like the places where the rich lived, and there were no high walls protecting you. Your home typically was a rough cinder-block structure or reinforced concrete building. But many dwellings in Cité Soleil and other slums were nothing more than corrugated iron sheets put together as a sort of container for people, with a crude opening as an entry but probably with no actual door. No electric power, no running water, no toilet, no cooling, no real place to cook—just walls and a roof, not much more. And in the same way the homes of the rich in Pétionville looked much like the homes of the rich anywhere, your home in Port-au-Prince looked like the slum dwellings of the poor practically anywhere in Latin America or Africa.3
Cité Soleil is home to maybe 400,000 (no census is available4) of the very poorest people in Haiti, some of the poorest people anywhere in the world. Eighty percent of Haitians are thought to live below the poverty line, and 54 percent live in abject poverty.5
The unemployment rate in Haiti is around 40 percent, as best as can be estimated,6 but two-thirds of those in Haiti who do “work” have informal jobs, meaning they don’t receive regular wages or benefits from an employer. They try to sell things—anything—in tiny stalls or on foot by the side of the road. It’s hard work but it just doesn’t get counted as employment when figures are tallied. And gross domestic product (GDP) doesn’t include the productivity of people who work in this way.
Katz makes an important point about this sort of labor. In Haiti and in most poor countries, almost everybody actually does work. They are working hard to survive, often harder than many people whose work is tallied. The product of this work, however, never finds its way into GDP.
Living in Cité Soleil, the chances that you had a high school education were practically nonexistent. You probably couldn’t read: Haiti’s literacy rate is only 53 percent. That means that the chances that you had any sort of real job were virtually zero. You probably suffered malnutrition as a child. One in ten children dies before the age of five in Haiti, and malnutrition is the leading cause of death. Of those who survive, one-third show signs of severe growth retardation, and 40 percent of five-year-olds are stunted and have reduced brain development resulting from inadequate n
utrition.
You were probably born in a rural area and migrated to the city for a chance at getting out of poverty, a chance that didn’t materialize. Still, you were better off than if you had stayed on the farm. You didn’t have a car. You might have had a bicycle or even a motorcycle, but chances are you mostly walked to get from place to place or took a “tap tap,” a converted pickup truck that carries passengers in a brightly painted enclosure over its bed.
Cité Soleil was established as a workers’ community close to the former Haitian American Sugar Company factory; it was intended to give workers easy access to their place of work. Later it housed laborers for the export-processing zone established by the dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. But all that has collapsed, in no small part due to policies imposed by the United States. Now the walk to work is long, arduous, and dangerous.
Cité Soleil is also one of the most violent places on Earth.7 Gangs run the slums, and their foot soldiers are known as the chimeres (ghosts). Chimere is a highly derogatory term and is applied as an invective to slander people of a different political persuasion or class. It is used widely to describe the poorest people in Haiti and to associate them with criminal behavior.8 The gang structure is, in fact, very complex. People’s motivations for joining gangs vary considerably and may include genuine political reasons.9 But all gangs profit from the absence of effective law enforcement, and their members rob, extort, and rape with impunity.
One of the chief activities in Haiti is the random work of the countless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The word countless is not accidentally chosen—no one knows for sure how many there are. Working for one of these NGOs is one of the few ways a neg can make a reasonable salary and be treated reasonably well. UN peacekeepers make up a massively omnipresent force in Haiti. They are the troops of MINUSTAH—the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. As of January 31, 2015, there were 6,892 uniformed personnel comprising 4,658 troops and 2,234 police.10 They come from an astonishing array of countries. The cholera outbreak in northern Haiti that began ten months after the earthquake (and had nothing at all to do with the quake itself, though it may have advanced more aggressively because the state was weakened by the quake) was brought by MINUSTAH troops from Nepal.11 The UN pays countries to provide troops for MINUSTAH, which is why troops so often come from poor countries like Bangladesh.