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Dakila Kim P. Yee, University of the Philippines Visayas Tacloban College, Philippines
In a seaside community known to locals as the ‘reclamation area’, Pablo* gathers a scrap metal roof which was blown away from other houses during the height of typhoon Haiyan. He told me that he would need this to repair his roof which was destroyed by the Typhoon. Rubble greeted us as we searched for other materials which would come in handy. Some of the homes have been vacated, out of fear for the treacherous sea that destroyed hundreds of makeshift homes and claimed thousands of lives in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines, and other neighbouring towns. When he was asked what he felt about the ‘no-build zone’, Pablo replied that he didn’t want to leave the area. Living in a relocation area would mean additional costs for transportation which he could not afford to bear as he was earning below the minimum as a part-time porter in the city. “We have survived other typhoons, there’s no reason to believe that we won’t survive this one,” he quipped. Across the bay from where we stood, I saw the building of McDonalds. Up close, the windows and the doors have been sealed off by wooden planks, the building damaged first by the rampaging storm surge; second, by desperate survivors scavenging the building for whatever food items or materials that could help them cope in the aftermath of Haiyan. Ten months later, a newly renovated McDonald’s opened its doors to a throng of customers excited to have a taste of its products. Why are business establishments allowed to construct within this 40 meter ‘no build zone’, whereas poor residents living along these same zones are barred from renovating their homes? This is a complex question that cannot be answered in a short essay, but I argue that the ‘post-political’ way of addressing the root causes of this disaster contributes to the glossing over of fundamental inequities that contributed to the disaster in the first place.
Haiyan made landfall on a geographical landscape that has been marked by extreme poverty and political exclusion. Rural underdevelopment in Eastern Visayas, Philippines, where Tacloban is located, is marked by landlessness and high tenancy rates that have become major drivers of internal migration into the major coastal cities in the region such as Tacloban. These migrants jostle for space within the pockets of informal settlements near coastal zones due to the lack of state-sponsored mass housing projects. Demographic concentration over narrow pieces of land along the coastline is a recipe for disaster. Most of the casualties were residents of these informal settlements in coastal communities, swallowed by rampaging storm surge. The catastrophic consequences of an exclusionary political economy in the face of a natural hazard event have been well documented within the social science literature of disasters (cf. Wisner, Blaikie, Cannon, & Davis, 2003) and this has been further validated in the case of Tacloba