Coping with frosts, governments and disaster experts: some reflections based on a New Guinea experience and a perusal of the relevant literature

Abstract

In 1972 there was a prolonged drought in much of New Guinea. Above 2300 m it gave rise to some 30 nights of ground frost over a four-month period. The frosts did considerable damage to the natural vegetation and to the food gardens of the subsistence agriculturalists living there. This damage is to be explained by the fact that they have a largely tropical lowland domesticated food complex. The continuities that exist between the New Guinea disaster and those experienced elsewhere in the Third World are significant in spite of the profound differences existing in the scale and duration of colonial penetration. Until four or five years ago natural hazards research was more or less the preserve of a small group of geographers centring on White. Given this reality it is scarcely possible to adopt even a laissez-faire attitude to disaster relief – that it serves as a 'limited kind of wealth redistribution at the periphery'.