Briefing from ROAPE Volume 12 Number 33
Disaster Prevention: Defining the Problem

I remember hearing a story, during the Sahelian famine of the ‘70s, of a fat man and a thin man. Said the fat man to the thin man, "You should be ashamed of yourself. If someone visiting the country saw you before anyone else, he would think there was a famine here". Replied the thin man, "And if he saw you next, he would know the reason for the famine!" The simple point I am trying to make is that if you divide our society into two, into the majority prone to disaster and that minority resistant to it, you are likely to find some sort of a relation between the two.