Resumo de Living On Borowed Times

As the storm clouds of Hurricane Mitch lifted they revealed more than just horrific damage. In a moment of rare clarity, the receding floodwaters laid bare the complex and destructive effects of unpayable foreign debt on economies,the environment and the lives of people.

People die or lose their property during disasters often because they are poor and forced to live in environmentally vulnerable areas such as river banks and coastal regions. Over one billion people live like this at the whim of storm surges and tidal waves. It was hard to build homes in Nicaragua and Honduras equipped to withstand nature and plan ahead for natural disasters while the countries paid 50 per cent and 80 per cent respectively of their government revenues in debt service each year.

The litany of tragic statistics and their scale ? the thousands dead, millions homeless, and bridges, farms and factories gone ? somehow seemed to dehumanise what had happened. Only desperate tales of survival made events real again, like the woman who survived for days in the sea clutching flotsam, or the children who were tied to tree branches at night by parents determined they would not be the flood?s next victims.

Central America?s disaster, robbing the region at a stroke of its export potential and putting development back decades, demanded a radical rethink on solving its economic problems and shed light on the challenges facing other poor countries. Only weeks before, Bangladesh, another desperately poor and indebted country, had also been devastated by floods. And before that, an unusually extreme bout of the weather phenomena known as El Niño, possibly exaggerated by the effects of global warming, had wreaked havoc from Latin America to Africa.

Questions were also raised in some of the indebted countries about how forests were cleared to be replaced by farms producing goods for export in the name of economic development, and to service foreign debts. And, about how this type of development tended to leave the land more vulnerable to erosion, turning natural weather damage into unnatural disasters. However it is looked at, strengthening the poor against either the winds of the next hurricane or the volatile currents of economic globalisation, needs realistic debt reduction as part of a broad-based anti-poverty strategy. Lifting people out of poverty is the surest way to guarantee fewer have to be lifted from floodwaters in future.

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