In the second half of the twentieth century, typhoon-triggered floods affected all sectors of society in the Philippines, but none more so than the urban poor, particularly the esteros-dwellers or shanty-town inhabitants, residing in the low-lying locales of Manila and a number of other cities on Luzon and the Visayas. The growing number of post-war urban poor in Manila, Cebu City and elsewhere, was largely due to the policy repercussions of rapid economic growth and impoverishment under the military-led Marcos regime. At this time in the early 1970s, rural poverty and environmental devastation increased rapidly, and on a hitherto unknown scale in the Philippines. Widespread corruption, crony capitalism and deforesting the archipelago caused large-scale forced migration, homelessness and a radically skewed distribution of income and assets that continued to favour elite interests.

The typhoons and floods that occurred in the Marcos years were labelled 'natural disasters' by the authorities in Manila. But in fact, it would have been more appropriate to label them un-natural, or man-made disasters because of the nature of politics in those unsettling years. The typhoons and floods of the 1970s and 1980s, which took a huge toll in lives and left behind an enormous trail of physical destruction and other impacts after the waters receded, were caused as much by the interactive nature of politics with the environment, as by geography and the typhoons per se, as the principal cause of natural calamity.

 

James Warren is Professor of Southeast Asian Modern History at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He gained his PhD in Southeast Asian History from the Australian National University, and is an internationally renowned scholar of Southeast Asian studies. Warren, who speaks or reads, Spanish, Dutch, Malay-Indonesian, Samal Bajau Laut and Japanese, is a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities.  In 2003, he received the Centenary Medal of Australia for 'Service to Australian Society and the Humanities in the Study of Ethnohistory,' and in 2013, he was awarded the Grant Goodman Prize in Historical Studies from the Philippine Studies Group, Association for Asian Studies.