By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Sep 25 2004 (IPS)

Haiti, devastated this week by the torrential rains of Tropical Storm Jeanne, has shown itself to be exceptionally vulnerable to natural disasters in comparison to the other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a U.N. specialised agency.

The flooding provoked by the storm has resulted in at least 2,000 deaths and disappearances in the Caribbean nation, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.

The Secretariat of the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) contrasted the severe damage suffered by Haiti with the deaths of only 11 people caused by the same storm in the Dominican Republic, where the rains were even heavier.

The loss of lives and homes was greater in Haiti than in the rest of the Caribbean combined, noted Brigitte Leoni, a spokesperson for the U.N. agency.

One of the reasons for this is the unbridled deforestation that has reduced the forest cover in Haiti to only nine percent of the territory, as compared to 14 percent in the Dominican Republic.

ISDR technical advisor Pedro Basabe spoke about the influence of human factors on deforestation in Haiti. Rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation, a lack of adequate land management policies, and a heavy dependence on charcoal, which leads to the excessive felling of trees, have all served to exacerbate Haiti’s environmental fragility, he explained.

Another reason for the unequal effects of the tropical storm is the insufficiency of disaster preparedness mechanisms in Haiti. This is due in part to the fact that the country’s civil protection agency is “sorely lacking in financial resources,” Basabe told IPS.

By contrast with other countries, the civil protection agency is not attached to the armed forces in Haiti, where the army was disbanded in 1995.

International organisations have provided training for the agency in Haiti, and a certain amount of progress has been made in developing a natural disaster early warning system. However, there are serious obstacles to the dissemination of this information, particularly in the more remote regions, Basabe said.

The country’s communications and transportation infrastructure is highly deficient, he added, noting that the highways are in extremely poor condition.

Moreover, Haiti is once again facing a period of political instability, which means the country does not have the stable social climate needed to design and implement adequate disaster reduction strategies.

But overall, said Basabe, the Latin American and Caribbean region is increasingly better prepared to confront natural disasters.

For example, there are subregional agencies like the Central American Centre for the Prevention of Natural Disasters, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency, and an organisation recently founded by the Andean countries for the same purpose.

According to the ISDR, Cuba is a prime example of how the vulnerability of the population can be reduced through measures that do not involve high costs, as long as there is a strong determination to carry them out.

When devastatingly powerful Hurricane Ivan passed through the Caribbean two weeks ago, Cuba once again clearly demonstrated that it is a model for other developing nations in disaster risk management, said ISDR director Salvano Briceño.

Cuba’s experience could easily be replicated in countries with similar economic conditions, and even in those that have greater economic resources but do not manage to protect their populations as well as Cuba does, he said.

Natural disasters hit poor countries especially hard, according to statistics on economic damages from the 1990s.

In that decade alone, the developing world suffered 200 billion dollars in losses as a result of natural disasters, representing 13 percent of the combined GDP of developing countries.

During the same period, the damages in industrialised nations totalled 600 billion dollars, a figure three times greater but with a considerably smaller relative impact, as it is equivalent to only two to three percent of the combined GDP.

At the next World Conference on Disaster Reduction, to be held Jan 18-22, 2005 in Kobe, Japan, the need to integrate disaster risk and vulnerability reduction into development plans will be a central theme.

Haiti’s vulnerability was allowed to grow to such an extent that any natural threat could lead to a major catastrophe, Briceño warned.

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