Foreign Capital, Local Cost: Lives lost and livelihoods damaged in the wreckage of social injustices - Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean

Nov 14

The last week of October, our region once again paid the price for a crisis fabricated not from our yard - foreign capital. Hurricane Melissa hit notably Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and Dominican Republic from late Monday night through to the end of that week. The aftershocks of this hurricane - striking near the end of the season - will ripple through affected communities and islands for months if not years.

In a matter of 24 hours, Hurricane Melissa quickly intensified to a category 5 hurricane , doubling in speed with “sustained winds of 175mph (282 kph), and a central pressure around 900 milibars” - the most powerful storm to hit our region this year. Recovery efforts and aid relief sources have already begun (see hyperlinks for more, and below) across affected islands, but this devastation once again demonstrates the disproportionate impact of a global climate breakdown on our communities (and certain populations within these communities). The death toll has reached 79 persons killed (as so far recorded) across the islands affected by Hurricane Melissa, including at least 43 persons killed in Haiti alone. In Jamaica, footage shared demonstrates the devastation caused, flattening entire parishes and isolating communities from elemental supplies and facilities. Rebuilding will take time, let alone re-constructing the logistics of community - corner shops down the road, pipes carrying running water, transport routes and stations, care centres, electricity and network services…and more.

Menstruators, women and children will experience these aftereffects of this hurricane distinctly, with the restriction or complete stripping of easy and unchecked water access and use, isolation from or overrunning of care facilities, infrastructural lack of resources… These are dangers and urgencies that must be placed within the overall needs communities are facing in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa.

This post aims to ground the climate injustices faced by our region in a brief historical context that connects with the devastating effects on gender injustices, as well as addressing, most importantly, what resources can we use to get more informed about Hurricane Melissa (among others), as well as what organisations on the ground, in our countries and in directly affected islands, we can engage and support with.

Crucially, remember our team did a piece about Hurricane Beryl in July 24? And we here again in October 25 for a piece on Hurricane Melissa. This hurricane is the latest symptom of the increasingly dangerous effects our archipelago is confronted with in our environments that sit within the globally differentiated harms of climate breakdown.

How can we understand the context for this?

The invasion of European colonisation in the Caribbean, from Columbus and later through the economy of the transatlantic enslaved trade, completely levelled relationship with land and people. Indigenous systems of stewardship were stamped out through the first recorded genocide in our region. These systems were erased in favour of a domination of natural ecosystems that no longer constituted a relationship, it constituted ownership and extraction. The implementation of the plantation systems in the Caribbean extracted resources, levelling land and transforming it into the same ‘commodity’ as those who were forced to work it, survivors of First Peoples genocide and survivors trafficked across the Middle Passage. The Caribbean was the lab ground for systems of domination that would violate human and land bodies to extract, invoking a brutal way of existing. In islands, plantation estates carved up all available (after the mass ethnic cleansing and repression of Kalinago, Taino, Garifuna…peoples) lands - causing, notably, mass deforestation, soil fertility depletion, architectural infrastructure that disregarded the geography (and therefore structural needs) of islands (for instance - building over mangrove land? building with no regard when land is placed near or on tectonic plates? Or establishing trade routes near and across marine reef zones?).

"Positioned for trade rather than resilience, these coastal and riverine sites facilitated plantation economies but left communities acutely vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding…Colonialism scarred both people and place - up rooting communities, exhausting soils, and leaving the earth itself bearing witness to exploitation"

Plantation estates were further cultivated with monocrops - one crop at a time, on a massive scale - which destroyed the ways that soil and lands previously worked together. The primary crop, especially in British-occupied Caribbean colonies (which became a majority of the Caribbean by the turn of the 19th century) cultivated was sugar cane. Sugar is extremely soil exhaustive and labour intensive. What this means is that you need a large amount of space for a sugar plantation, huge amounts of (dangerous) technology, and a rapid turnover of labour to sustain the crop. Notably, the main part of sugar plantation estates that was not considered entirely disposable was the final product: sugar. Setting up sugar plantations required a mass clearing of land, which completely removed natural ecosystems, trees and plants - all by the blood, assault, coercion and industrialised murder of First People indigenous, and trafficked African populations under chattel enslavement. Cultivating sugarcane would deplete the soil in one or two plant generations (yields). The cultivation of the crop was exhaustive, with technology that increased an already high mortality rate due to the ruthless cruelty of chattel enslavement. It was also extremely profitable - sugar profits were a financial cesspit that to a great extent fuelled the transatlantic enslaved trade.

Mass deforestation for instance removes part of an island’s natural defences to the devastation of hurricanes, soil fertility depletion for instance renders lands more vulnerable to erosion (and therefore a higher risk of flooding during storms), the building of architecture for the sole purposes of export for instance did not create infrastructure dedicated to the care and resources needed for people to live and thrive together. The violent implementation of the plantation system in the Caribbean lay the foundations of a global economy that would treat environments in the Global South as wastelands, lands from which to extract resources and to which to offload waste. The plantation system in the Caribbean, as an embodiment of a colonial way of inhabiting our world; shapes a global network where - for instance - certain neo-colonial and imperial powers will extract and use more resources than necessary, offloading the waste in the same areas they extract these resources from and further breakdown our global climate.

What is called climate breakdown is not recent, it has an entire history that spans as far back as 1492, regionally and globally reproduced through models of oppression and exploitation.

Hurricane Melissa is symptomatic of the effects of this global framework. This hurricane got so powerful so rapidly, partly due to rising ocean temperatures: the overexhaustion of the world's natural resources for instance heats up waters, whereby seas absorb 80% of this heat and accelerate wind speeds - both of these translate to stronger hurricanes with more rainfall capacity. It was previously rare for hurricanes to intensify to such a category so quickly, let alone make landfall at this strength - about only 4% do so. Colonial systems render natural environments in our region fragile and more vulnerable to disasters, previously natural and now entirely ‘Man’-accelerated and intensified. Our communities and ecosystems continue to pay the ever-increasing price.

What are the unjust effects?

Hitting Jamaica and Haiti most destructively, entire parishes have been flattened, in Haiti at least 11,000 persons are now displaced into shelters. In Jacmel in southern Haiti, a coastline road has been completely chopped and flooded out, isolating communities on either side from access. In Cuba, Hurricane Melissa is recorded to have had an accumulated rainfall of 14 inches.

The realities in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa cause differentiated harm, to lower-income communities, according to the distinct needs of different populations, their geographic location….

If we remember that Caribbean islands were levelled for the purpose of plantation, our modern development starts and is sustained through colonisation - institutions built, buildings and facilities constructed (so we talking health centres, schools, markets…) were mapped according to where the needs were for chattel enslavement trade purposes. This usually means a centralisation of facilities and development near designated capitals (and if those change, that surface will be abandoned for the newer one, such as the changes from Tobago’s first capital on the south-eastern coast, later shifting to Scarborough - via Roxborough and Plymouth - so concentrating any development in the western part of the island) and therefore neglecting facility development in other areas of a given island, leaving that largely to post-independence social construction yet still with the lingering rot of structural colonial hangovers.

Building for extraction strips the possibility of building sustainably, for care. This inscribes deeply traumatic brutalities into the legacies we inherit, rotting through distinct forms of social injustices. We cannot wait for the next hurricane to come to perhaps regroup and rebuild better, to perhaps connect and engage across our archipelago and social justice movements stronger and to perhaps repair and heal for the long-term.

What can we do?

At time of finalising this post, COP30 is underway in Belem, Brazil. This year’s session seeks to emphasise the significance of indigenous communities as active participants and - should be - leaders in talks held between global powers. This is especially apt due to the weight of COP30’s location, in the country where the majority of the world's primary lung - the Amazon rainforest - is situated. Indigenous communities have emphasised the need for their voices to be more than performatively heard and condescended to, but to be active leaders of talks re-shaping global futures towards sustainability and not in further forms of greenwashed or outright extraction directed by neo-colonial powers and at the cost of communities and environments across the Global South. The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) is holding several hubs, actions, events for feminist and climate justice activists and advocates with partner organisations/fundees - including the Caribbean Feminist Climate Justice Movement from Bim, big up! -, also sharing tools and resources for anyone of us seeking to be further engaged.

There are several resources and efforts already underway to support the rehabilitation of communities in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba… We can support by donating to these campaigns (see below as well), particularly acting so that, when next hurricane come, our region is more aptly protected to weather the storm and its aftermath. The contamination of this ‘foreign capital’ is right now triggered through the worsening risks of a global climate breakdown and brought to our doorstep by the same hands that used to oppress us. Our region must no longer be the ones burdening the local cost of the weeds sowed in our yard by the reapers of a next yard over. Our work to obtain justice, informing building a longer-term sustainability for and by us, must be matched with the transformative repair. Because at the end of the day, you dutty up the kitchen? ‘You do the dishes’.