Puerto Ricos Agriculture and Farmers Decimated by Maria

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

Puerto Rico's Agriculture and Farmers Decimated by Maria

By FRANCES ROBLES and LUIS FERRÉ-SADURNÍ SEPT. 24, 2017

YABUCOA, P.R. — José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him.

“How do you calculate everything?” Mr. Rivera said.

For as far as he could see, every one of his 14,000 trees was down. Same for the yam and sweet pepper crops. His neighbor, Luis A. Pinto Cruz, known to everyone here as “Piña,” figures he is out about $300,000 worth of crops. The foreman down the street, Félix Ortiz Delgado, spent the afternoon scrounging up the scraps that were left of the farm he manages. He found about a dozen dried ears of corn that he could feed the chickens. The wind had claimed the rest.

“There will be no food in Puerto Rico,” Mr. Rivera predicted. “There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.”

Hurricane Maria made landfall here Wednesday as a Category 4 storm. Its force and fury stripped every tree of not just the leaves, but also the bark, leaving a rich agricultural region looking like the result of a postapocalyptic drought. Rows and rows of fields were denuded. Plants simply blew away.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/24/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-agriculture-.html

[procon]

1. Recovery will be like building the whole country from scratch.

It will take years and cost billions just to get back the basic needs of civilization so people can live normal lives.

[riversedge]

2. A people without agriculture, he said, are a people without food.

They need our help, that is for sure.


.......On the ride to San Juan, he looked around at toppled trees, downed telephone poles, tangled power lines, roofs and crumbled wood structures and wept.

“I could not take seeing my country in pieces like that,” he said, holding back tears.

Mr. Pinto also lost all of his cattle. Literally. He does not know where they are.

He plans to start over as he did a decade ago when he lost everything to a flood. He will get about 35 percent of the value back from insurance, and will not quit, he said, using an expression that has become a popular hashtag: #yonomequito — I will not give up.

“A people without agriculture,” he said, “are a people without food.”

[TexasProgresive]

3. Proper word is destroyed.

I don't know why people like decimated, it is weak.