Understanding the potent threat posed by natural disasters to hemispheric security

Oct 11, 2020 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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Kaieteur News – (A Review of David Granger’s Human safety and environmental security in the Caribbean Basin.)
Security and the environment have been central concerns to David Granger’s intellectual, governmental and political pursuits. Granger establishes the link between the safety of Caribbean populations and the security of the natural environment in his Human safety and environmental security in the Caribbean Basin.
Granger, before being elected to the Presidency, had authored books and articles on national and regional security. Granger provides a framework for examining security within the Caribbean in a more comprehensive book – Caribbean Geopolitics: security, stability and sovereignty in small states. As President, he piloted the country’s Green State Development Strategy: Vision 2040. Security and the environment have been common themes in numerous addresses which he delivered while President.
Human safety and environmental security in the Caribbean Basin constitute the text of an address delivered by Granger at the Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington, DC, in September 2017. Granger, formerly an adjunct professor at the Centre, argued that environmental hazards were deadly, if not deadlier, threats to regional security than traditional security threats such as civil disorder and terrorism. He was not overstating his case.
The Caribbean has suffered innumerable deaths and immeasurable damage and destruction as a result of natural disasters. Each hurricane season, for example, renews the ceaseless cycle of catastrophe.
Natural disasters, according to Granger, not only threaten human safety but also heighten the Caribbean’s vulnerability to both traditional and non-traditional security threats. Noting that it is the common interest of both the United States and the Caribbean to recognize the effects of environmental damage and degradation, Granger urges that security cooperation be re-engineered to take into account the special environmental needs of small-island developing and low lying-coastal states in the Caribbean basin.
This monograph highlights the often overlooked security implications of natural disasters – especially hurricanes and other tropical storms – which wreak havoc on regional economies. But they also weaken state security and make states more vulnerable to transnational criminal activities such as narco-trafficking, human trafficking, illegal migration and gun running.
The Caribbean is particularly prone to natural disasters. Granger notes that the Region’s hurricanes originate in the warmer waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the West African coast and wend their way westwards to the Caribbean Islands. They have often threatened the East Coast of the United States. Granger also establishes a link between climate change and global warming and the frequency and ferocity of these storms which are influenced by oceanic temperatures during the warmer months of the year.
The Caribbean, historically, has been an arena of fierce inter-state warfare. In the imperial era, the Caribbean became the ‘cockpit’ of European empires which waged wars against each other for the possession of colonies and the control of sea lanes in their quest to strengthen their strategic spheres of supremacy.
The United States of America, in its quest to heighten its hemispheric hegemony, became concerned with the maintenance of independent and friendly states as a means of containing so-called socialist or communist regimes which were perceived to be threats to its own national security. According to a US Special Intelligence Estimate 80-62 of 1962, the Caribbean was the link between USA and the larger American republics in Central and South America. The USA was concerned with “…keeping its southern flank free of hostile military power, and with maintaining the unrestricted operation of the Panama Canal and of other US installations.”
The Caribbean emerged as a major transhipment zone for trafficking in narcotics when the USA began to intensity its interdiction and eradication efforts in Central and South America, especially in Colombia. Transnational threats – narco-trafficking, human trafficking and gun running – became the USA’s principal security concerns in the Region with the end of the Cold War.
As Granger notes in this monograph, Human safety and environmental security in the Caribbean Basin, environmental hazard emerged as a threat – one that is costlier than conventional warfare. Environmental hazards now pose a formidable threat not only to Caribbean countries but also to USA’s national interests.
According to Granger, “Environmental hazards – cyclones, hurricanes, tornados or typhoons – threaten human safety. They result in death and destruction comparable to any battlefield of conventional warfare.” Granger notes that the recovery effort from Hurricane Harvey was estimated to exceed US$100 billion, a sum that is one sixth of the military budget of the richest armed forces in the world – those of the United States of America. A stronger case could hardly have been made as to why US security concerns about the Caribbean Basin should include environmental threats.
Granger explains why environmental security should be of common interest to both the United States and the Caribbean and why there is a need for security cooperation to take account of this emergent threat. Security cooperation between Guyana and the United States, unfortunately, continues to be biased narrowly in favour of US national interests. US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s whirlwind visit to some selected states in the Region – including Suriname, Colombia and Guyana – was not without significance.
US security concerns about narco-trafficking seemed to be foremost on the agenda. The US government entered a Shiprider Agreement with the Government of Guyana which would allow for joint patrols, supposedly to combat narco-trafficking. The agreement between the two countries ignored the security threat posed by environmental hazards. Both countries missed the opportunity to reengineer security cooperation to address this threat, as has been suggested by Granger years earlier.
The idea that environmental destruction has become a threat to national security is not new. In the Caribbean, however, it has assumed greater traction than elsewhere primarily because the people of the Caribbean have an actual endured experience, often annually, of the devastating impact of natural disasters.
Human safety and environmental security in the Caribbean Basin deepen public understanding of the potent threat posed by natural disasters to hemispheric security. It is an insightful publication which should be required reading by those with an interest – academic or strategic – in ensuring that security cooperation, particularly between the United States and the Caribbean, becomes more responsive to environmental threats than is the case at present.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

 

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