Lands of Catastrophe: The Case of India and Pakistan - Mises Institute

Less than a year after a Tsunami killed approximately 275,000 people in the poorer part of Asia,[1] another 80,000 have died in Pakistan and India from an earthquake that hit on 8 October 2005.[2] An estimated 3.3 million are now homeless in the harsh winter of the region.

Close to a million are still sleeping in the open — all at risk of dying — while the states of India and Pakistan each work to ensure that no territory is lost to the other in this long fought-over region. They will not even allow separated families on either side of the border to meet or even telephone.

For imperialist rulers, it is the land — not people — that matters. In the same vein, on 18 October, terrorists killed a state minister in the Indian part of Kashmir to prove that they were still active.

Millions suffer every year in the subcontinent from a cycle of horrible floods and water shortages. Millions die of easily and cheaply treatable diseases. Hundreds of thousands die like flies — and nature gets the blame.

Why is it that so many people die in these countries while the West hardly ever suffers from such problems? (Not even the flooding of New Orleans can compare.) Any layman should be able to correlate the facts to see that it does not have much to do with nature.

Facts will continue to come to light on the Kashmir catastrophe, but for the moment let us take a quick look at how much these disasters result from the wrath of nature, and how much is really the result of human arrogance and stupidity.

Environmentalism Against the Environment

When I was a kid, my family loved to travel to the mountains in the north of India. There were beautiful wooden houses everywhere. There was ample wood around, which was cheap, strong, and readily available. More importantly the skill developed over a period of generations was helpful to construct houses that absorbed shocks. Wood does not fall apart as easily as concrete does when an earthquake strikes, and it is a lot less heavy.

But that was then. We soon got "environmentalists" who called themselves saviors of the trees. They started haranguing everyone about how quickly forests were disappearing, and the price of wood went through the roof. People no longer owned their own trees.

To "make the nation strong," the state of India controlled the cement industry. They ensured that heavily subsidized cement was readily available in the mountains, while in the plains it was available only in the black market and at an exorbitant price. Within a decade the mountains were covered by ugly cement buildings. Cement houses were far less insulated and, in a final irony, they needed more wood for heating. So much for saving the trees.

(Many of these same "environmentalists" called for state intervention on behalf of the poor. As a result, the state provided huge subsidies on the supply of cooking gas, which ended up making it unavailable to the poor because the middle class bought it all up. This is another reason why more wood got burnt away.)

The cement houses crumbled whenever the ground shook. While the "environmentalists" and the state destroyed the natural order, the void in the construction industry was filled by corrupt bureaucrats. Most of the cement houses were made without any architectural supervision. The so-called "architects" in these countries mostly act as liaisons to bribe city bureaucrats to approve a house after the householder has built it himself. (As a high school student, I "designed" and supervised construction of my parents' house). These buildings were not designed to absorb the shock of earthquakes.

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[ Ludwig von Mises Institute ]