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TSUNAMI IMPACT: Ranks of the New Poor Swell

Marwaan Macan-Markar

GALLE, Sri Lanka, Jan 13 2005 (IPS) - Philip De Vota has joined the ranks of Sri Lanka’s poor for the first time in his 54 years. This reality since the day after Christmas last month gnaws at him, leaving him ”depressed”.

”I am ashamed to beg. I cannot bear having to depend on handouts,” said De Vota, a father of three children, who till Christmas day knew he had a secure job as the manager of a shop selling shoes in the bazaar of this city in southern Sri Lanka.

Then the tsunami struck on Dec. 26, its ferocious waters rampaging through the bazaar where De Vota’s shop was located. It was destroyed along with row after row of buildings that housed banks, offices, shops and travel agencies.

That he survived the waves that crashed through this city famed for its ancient Dutch fort is a miracle, he admits. ”I ended up clinging on an iron door when the water surged through the streets,” he said. ”I lost hope of living. I closed my eyes. The whole drama lasted a few minutes.”

Yet survival has brought with it a burden that is alien to him – living without a steady income, depending on relief convoys for food, and the vision of poverty looming.

De Vota’s predicament is one mirrored across the Indian Ocean countries that were ravaged by the tsunamis triggered by a 9.0 undersea quake off the north-western tip of Indonesia.

On Thursday, the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) estimated that nearly 1.5 million people have plunged into becoming the region’s new poor due to the natural disaster.

Indonesia is the worst affected, the Manila-based regional financial institution noted in a report on the impact of the tsunamis. It estimated that close to one million people have been forced into poverty.

Those numbers come on top of the dismal trail of death in the worst hit areas of Aceh and north-western Sumatra. The toll had climbed to more than 100,000 deaths in the Indonesian archipelago and over 600,000 people being displaced. Search for the missing, currently estimated at 48,000, and counting, continues.

In Sri Lanka, where over 30,000 died, the AsDB estimates that nearly 250,000 people will be forced into poverty, while in India, where nearly 9,000 people died, the number of the new poor is put at 645,000.

And in the Maldives, among the smallest of the 12 nations struck by the tsunami that has killed over 160,000 people across Asia, the bank estimates that close to 23,500 people have been driven into poverty. That country of islands famed for their underwater beauty lost 82 people to the tsunami.

”The majority of Indonesians who died are fishermen. The fishing communities are the worst hit,” an Indonesian diplomat at the country’s Bangkok mission told IPS. ”In cities like Banda Aceh, you also have middle class people, construction workers and street vendors without work.”

Equally destitute are the thousands who depended on the vibrant tourism sector in affected countries like the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand for their income.

Days after the tsunami, Thailand’s Tourism Minister Sontaya Kunplome told the media that nearly 200,000 employees in the tourism sector may be out of jobs, since the waves levelled stretches of the Thai coast that were prime tourist destinations.

What makes this new poor more vulnerable is the impact the tsunami had on the traditional safety net – the large, extended family – that the poor in most countries could fall back on if their sources of income dry up.

”This crisis is striking because families have lost large number of income earners. The safety net has been destroyed,” AsDB’s Jaseem Ahmed said in an interview. ”Many who are now in poverty have no one to go back to. Getting back on their feet will be more challenging.”

That was not the case in the 1997 financial crisis when South-east Asia last faced a surge in the number of those falling below the poverty line. According to Ahmed, those affected then, largely urban workers who had migrated from the rural areas, had a safety net to go back to in the provinces.

Nevertheless, the 1997 crisis, which resulted in 30 million people reduced to being poor overnight across South-east Asia, also offers a glimmer of hope to tsunami survivors like De Vota.

Those with training and skills proved to be resilient.

”They found ways to get back to earning an income within a year or more,” Raj Kumar, head of the research division at the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), a Bangkok-based U.N. regional agency, told IPS.

Such success lay in friendlier credit schemes to help victims of the financial crisis, he added. ”It is crucial for financial assistance to be given to skilled people forced into poverty after the tsunami, so that they can return to their productive lives.”

For the moment, De Vota has little strength to imagine what shape his climb out of poverty will take. ”This has affected me totally. I don’t know how to go on,” he said with despair.