Puerto Rico
Where to find a celebrity chef? At a natural disaster.
Washington chef and restaurateur Jose Andres hit a milestone in relief work in Puerto Rico: Serving the 1 millionth meal to hurricane victims in three weeks through his World Central Kitchen, aided by hundreds of volunteers. Restaurateur Guy Fieri, a resident of Santa Rosa, Calif., cooked meals for wildfire evacuees in Sonoma County.
Puerto Rico’s treasured rainforest is hurricane victim
The only tropical rainforest in the United States is El Yunque National Forest, on the northeastern corner of Puerto Rico and one of the tourist attractions of the island. "Hurricane Maria was like a shock to the system...The whole forest is completely defoliated," Grizell Gonzalez of the International Institute of Tropical Forestry told the New York Times.
Half a million USDA boxes of food for Puerto Rico
Officials from USDA and Puerto Rico agreed on a household distribution program that will provide about 500,000 boxes, each holding from 9-16 pounds of U.S.-grown food, "directly to families affected by Hurricane Maria." The distribution, announced over the weekend, was approved through Oct. 27.
In isolated regions of Puerto Rico, food is rationed
He was jumping on logs, crouching under fallen trees, traversing paths of thick, waist-deep mud, on a three-hour journey on foot to the town. He was carrying only $2 in his pocket to buy toilet paper. A week after Hurricane María struck Puerto Rico, Edgardo Matías is surviving in Guaonico, one of nine isolated neighborhoods in the municipality of Utuado.
After Hurricane Maria, ‘There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico’
Puerto Rico's agriculture secretary, Carlos Flores Ortega, estimates Hurricane Maria wiped out 80 percent of the value of the island's crops in a matter of hours, worth $780 million, says the New York Times. The newspaper quoted a farmer on the southeast coast as saying, "There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won't be for a year or longer."
Deadly swine disease confirmed in Haiti
Disease experts confirmed a case of African swine fever in Haiti, the second known case in the Western hemisphere in two months and a potential risk to U.S. hog farmers. African swine fever is harmless to humans but has a high mortality rate among hogs; it wiped out nearly half of China's hogs in 2018 and 2019.