“There will be no food in Puerto Rico. There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer”. José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico speaking to FRANCES ROBLES and LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ of the NY Times.
Hurricane Maria, the monstrous Category 5 hurricane packing 155 mph winds that barreled it’s way through the Caribbean in a record-breaking rampage brought many island nations to their knees. We have seen images of roofs peeled off of homes and other structures, images of landslides, flooding, forests and electrical infrastructure flattened, and of course the stunned and terrified faces of American citizens in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The Thermal Structure of Hurricane Maria. Super Cold, High Cloud Tops are Abundant Near the Stormy Eyewall [OC]The New York Times provides back ground on the agricultural sector in Puerto Rico. In a nutshell, it’s gone. Livestock was killed, soil polluted by storm surge, sewage and chemicals. It is predicted that restoring the land for farming may take a year or more.
Across the island, Maria’s prolonged barrage took out entire plantations and destroyed dairy barns and industrial chicken coops. Plantain, banana and coffee crops were the hardest hit, Mr. Flores said. Landslides in the mountainous interior of the island took out many roads, a major part of the agriculture infrastructure there.
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For over 400 years, Puerto Rico’s economy was based on agriculture, historically focused on sugar cane, tobacco and citrus fruits. The island’s economy rapidly industrialized after World War II, leading to the downfall of agriculture production. In recent years, in part because of the island’s economic recession, people went back to the fields, and the industry is going through a small renaissance, growing at 3 to 5 percent every year over the past six years, Mr. Flores said. A growing farm-to-table movement has generated optimism in recent years about an agricultural rebirth.
Puerto Rico already imports about 85 percent of its food, and now its food imports are certain to rise drastically as local products like coffee and plantains are added to the list of Maria’s staggering losses. Local staples that stocked supermarkets, school lunchrooms and even Walmart are gone.
“Sometimes when there are shortages, the price of plantain goes up from $1 to $1.25. This time, there won’t be any price increase; there won’t be any product,” Mr. Rivera said. “When I heard the meteorologist say that the two had turned into a three and then a four, I thought, ‘Agriculture in Puerto Rico is over.’ This really is a catastrophe.”
Now that Puerto Rico is unable to care for itself, they depend on us, their fellow American citizens, to watch and make sure that FEMA is stepping up to the plate with food, water and medicine that they desperately need. The Guardian sheds some light on FEMA’s meal response so far.
The scale of the food crisis dwarfs the more widely publicized challenges of restoring power and communications. More than a third of Puerto Ricans are still struggling to live without drinking water.
However, Fema provides no details on food deliveries, keeping its public statements to the most general terms. On its website, Fema says it has provided “millions of meals and millions of liters of water”.
In fact many of those meals are military ready-to-eat meals that civilians find hard to digest if consumed for more than a few days.
Now the biggest provider of cooked meals says Fema is putting its operations at risk of closure.
World Central Kitchen, founded by chef José Andrés, cooks and distributes 90,000 meals a day through a network of local chefs and kitchens.
Its Fema contract, to provide just 20,000 meals a day, ended on Tuesday. Fema insists it is bound by federal rules that mean it will take several weeks for a new contract to emerge to feed more Americans.
“There is no urgency in the government response to this humanitarian crisis,” Andrés said. “They have all the officials and armed guards at headquarters, but they have no information about the island. They don’t even have a map they can share about who needs food. Fema is over-paying and it is under-delivering.”
A damaged banana plantation is seen after the area was hit by Hurricane Maria en Guayama, Puerto Rico A field of plantains is flooded one day after the impact of Hurricane Maria in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico Dead horses on the side of the road after the passing of Hurricane Maria, in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. Dead farm animals are a major source of disease in Puerto Rico’s streams and rivers which are being used for drinking water and bathing by hurricane victims.Grub Street reports on hero Jose Andres who is feeding thousands of hungry people on the island.
José Andrés’s valiant attempt to put something warm and delicious in the stomach of every hungry Puerto Rican has passed a new milestone — 350,000 meals served, enough to feed every one in ten residents. The chef has been feeding people on the storm-ravaged island since September 26, ten days after Hurricane Maria dished out “apocalyptic” damage there. Andrés’s World Central Kitchen team quickly established a base inside Puerto Rico’s biggest stadium, the Choliseo, where they continue to prepare tens of thousands of sandwiches and helpings of arroz con pollo. But in the last two weeks, volunteers have done an incredible job expanding into the island’s more remote regions via food trucks and smaller pop-ups, and working to take over school cafeterias that would otherwise remain empty, thanks to the storm:
This weekend, Andrés tweeted they’d opened a new kitchen in the city of Farjado, where 9,000 people were fed yesterday. Right now, they’re serving nearly 50,000 meals per day across the entire island — which means they could crack half a million by the end of the week. Clearly, those vats of paella are at least as humongous as they look:
In recent days, Andrés’s team has done door-to-door deliveries, used the National Guard to distribute 400 meals in an area that got ten feet of floodwater, and endured bad weather of their own. Andrés also added this weekend that his World Central Kitchen group will have to scale back efforts in the near future, but he’s optimistic that the framework is in place so that no Puerto Rican will go hungry — in fact, he predicts enough volunteers have joined the #ChefsForPuertoRico cause that they’ll soon be cranking out 350,000 meals every couple days. “We’re going to do 200,000 meals a day, no problem,” he said in a video last night.
Not all heroes wear capes.
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