The recent issue of PAHO news has the following article:

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Communities Need Training to Respond to Disasters, Experts Say
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Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, February 17, 1999- Communities need
training to handle rescue, first aid, and medical attention for disaster
victims, as well as lessons to deal with building evacuation in cases of
disaster, a group of experts recommended today.
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I recently wrote the following with regard to disaster preparedness and
Hurricane Mitch. It was written for an on-line conference sponsored by a
large international organization and a large NGO. It was not acceptable
and a "more laundered" edited version - with the names removed to protect
[whomever] - seems to have been unacceptable as well. The laundered
version is below. The longer version is on my website at the address
listed at the end of this version.

From: Sam Lanfranco <[log in to unmask]> Subject: El Salvador
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Knowledge management and ICTs would be useful in preparing for natural
disaster's such as Hurricane Mitch. The obvious question is "Why isn't
it being used?"

I was in the Caribbean for Hurricane Georges. The record of the Dominican
Republic contrasted dramatically with that of Cuba. Cuban TV informed on
the path of the hurricane. Cuba move populations and cattle, and harvested
the regional coffee and banana crop. In the Dominican Republic villages
were given no advanced warning that upstream floodgates would be opened
releasing a deadly wall of water.

There's nothing "natural" about the awful disaster of hurricanes. Lives
are lost to mud, water, hunger, disease though human agency. Hillsides
dissolve and shanty towns vanish in the flood waters because of economic
and political policies imposed on peasants who are forced into shanty town
deathtraps along river bank flood basins. For years those worn hillsides
and flood plains have been awaiting Mitch. [See "The Politics of Hurricane
Mitch" from [log in to unmask] ]

History sets the preconditions for disaster and the constraints on
preparedness. These include failed land reform and rural development
policies, failed export-lead strategies, unresolved social tensions, and
governments circumscribed by external factors.

After a decade of structural adjustment governments are mutilated by
cutbacks. How can they prepare if there's no money for gasoline, no
vehicles, skeleton staffs, no vaccines, no ability to stockpile drinking
water? How to battle epidemics when the ministries of health have been
decimated? How to rebuild when the ministries of works have been cut back?

Early warning systems require a capacity and will to prepare. Technology
and knowhow in response to disaster are a poor substitute for their use to
avert the worst of disaster. It sometime takes a disaster for appropriate
knowledge to overcome bad policies.

In the early 1980s life on the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca was
violently transformed when the narrow 30 km coastal strip was expropriated
for a tourism project (the Bahias de Huatulco). The region, is home to
about 50,000 people. Four indigenous groups living in 150 communities
dispersed over 700,000 hectares of highlands and small fishing villages.
The resort accelerated the processes of impoverishing native populations
and raising social tensions.

In 1993 a local NGO, the Centro de Soporte Ecologico (CSE) was created to
promote regional development. Hurricane Paulina, October 1997, intensified
the problems of the area. Communities found themselves in dire straits, as
national policy discriminated against rural production in general and
poor, small-scale farmers, in particular. With the help of CSE, local
communities, resort stakeholders and others build a strategy of community
based local resource management to address the problems reforestation,
water, and local markets.

The story is found in: " NGO-Community Collaboration for Ecotourism: A
Strategy for Sustainable Regional Development", by David Barkin, Professor
of Economics, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco Campus,
Mexico City and Carlos Paillus, Director, Centro de Soporte Ecologico,
Huatulco, Mexico. [Email: [log in to unmask]], to be published in
Tourism Recreation Review, Issuer No 2, 1999. It should be considerable
interest to post- Hurricane reconstruction in El Salvador. Of course, much
of the transferable expertise resides with, and is available through, the
local residents of the region.

Sam Lanfranco
Longer version of this at:  http://www.dkglobal.org/deadletter

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  Sam Lanfranco, c/o CERLAC                     email: [log in to unmask]
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  Sam Lanfranco                           email:[log in to unmask]
  Coordinator                              URL: http://www.dkglobal.org
  Distributed Knowledge Project      Tel: +416 816-2852 (cell/ans_mach)
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