Hurricane's Blog 1

Coming from the “Hurricanes” group is this blog post following an article written by Tim Hanstad and Roy Prosterman, the president and founder respectively of the nonprofit organization Landesa, which works towards securing land rights to the poverty-stricken in the world. This New York Times article, titled “How the Poor Get Washed Away,” argues that not even natural disasters affect the world’s social system equally. The world’s poorest people, with no rights or claim to land are hurt far worse than most others (relatively speaking), greatly due to the fact that their living conditions cannot tolerate the destructive power of such disasters. Most rural families in the developing world struggle with the rights to land ownership, and therefore cannot build homes (if they even have access to homes) to withstand potential natural dangers.
What is more, according to Hanstad and Prosterman, such insecurities within a country not only consequently result in difficult disaster recoveries, but also add to the struggles in economic development, overall poverty, and social tensions. Examples given by the article give some perspective to these ideas: a cyclone in Orissa, India hit poor fishermen hard by their refusal to heed warnings from the government (believing them to be ploys of eviction); government officials of Tacloban, Philippines are debating whether to take land from a squatter camp; and over 100,000 in Haiti are left with hardly any shelter after the earthquake. One situation in Aceh, Indonesia, however, is seeing great growth in the economy and falling poverty levels after having given those poor affected by the calamitous tsunami of 2004 new secure land rights (among other progressive reforms).
Much of what this article focuses on is the vulnerability of the landless poor. It is not unlike what author Hannigan says in his Disasters Without Borders in that vulnerability is most important to focus on to alleviate suffering from natural disasters. There can be as much response and aid to post-disaster situations as can be given, but if the vulnerability of any country’s inhabitants are not considered, there will be slow progress on the subject of natural disasters in the international community. 
Obviously, giving proper property rights to these poor families will not be the end-all solution to the international debate as to how to deal with the periods immediately before and after disasters. But the authors of this article make a sound point: there are those who are hit worse than others, and certain resolutions (i.e. property rights) have been demonstrated to be effective in both the recovery period, and the warning period (if there can be one) of a disaster. It would seem that an end to poverty would be a great relief to a great number of issues plaguing the international community. 

The link to the article is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/opinion/how-the-poor-get-washed-away.html