Wednesday, January 14, 2009 Editorial: Duryog Nivaran
DURYOG Nivaran is Sanskrit for disaster mitigation. It is also the name of a group in South Asia convened to help mitigate disasters, also known as the South Asia Network for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Among others, it publishes materials that make sense of disasters. Particularly in its South Asia Disaster Report 2005, it gathered insights on why hazards become disasters. These publications hold lessons we can learn a lot from.
The massive flooding in Northern Mindanao and how even high-end subdivisions were caught unawares amid the dark skies the past days should make us more aware of our vulnerability to disasters and how we should, as a community, mitigate the effects.
Vulnerability to disasters, for one, is as complicated as the workings of society such that knee-jerk reactions may bring more difficulties to the poor, who are most affected by disasters, more inconvenience to the better-off, and a life-changing drag to the barely able to sustain a middle-class income. Much like the disaster called the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (Carp) that sought to give land to the landless, but ended up shackling the landless with loans and other monetary obligations they couldn't even make heads and tails of. As a result, the landless have pawned off their lands, the program managing not to truly give land to the landless but shackle the landless with loans they never had before they were promised lands.
Why? Because this major attempt to enhance the livelihood of the poor tenant farmers did not come with adequate protective measures to help the poor tenant farmers cope with the hazards and difficulties of being landowners.
In Benfield Hazard Research Centre's Disaster Studies Working Paper entitled, "Mainstreaming disaster risk reduction: a tool for development organizations" (June 2005), it noted that "hazards are having an increasing impact on society as a result of rising levels of human vulnerability."
"In this respect disasters are not isolated events, but a manifestation of the deficiencies and weaknesses within society, induced by human-determined paths of development," the study added.
What then are the deficiencies and weaknesses within our society and policies? Do we even have safety nets in place if ever we think of giving financial assistance to those whose livelihoods are laid to waste by disasters or do they stand to become like a lot of Carp-beneficiaries -- landless with loans they never had before?
When mitigating disasters, foremost is the concern for livelihood. Disasters can wipe out livelihoods by the hundreds, and major disasters can mean rebuilding whole lives. Have we even thought this over or are we just standing by with sacks of rice, packs of noodles, boxes of sardines, and bundles of used clothes?
