Before the predicted climate monster El Niño, there was a relative calm. There was only a distant and lonely uproar from scientists who indicated that, according to projections taken from instruments that measure atmospheric magnitudes, there would be a high probability of an event of equal or greater duration and intensity than that which occurred in 1997 and 1998. What happened closer to the announced date of its dangerous arrival, the tension grows, knowing that it will always happen, because it has become a periodic event, with its antipode La Niño.

The major concern lies in whether the country will be properly prepared to face it, if it will have capable institutions, led by politically respected officers with such weight to acquire material and economic resources to accept the enormous challenge that will affect all social segments, especially , as in previous occasions, those with the lowest incomes, worse those who are in the last levels of rural poverty.

In terms of production activities, as before, the broad agricultural sector will have the greatest impact and suffering, which is absolutely serious, because from it comes the feeding of the population and the fate of export products, which forces the executive to act. prompt in the distribution of resources that his priority attention requires in order to provide peace to the community, providing machines and equipment ready to intervene on highways, neighboring roads, ports, bridges, which facilitate the mobility of goods to the cities and the most remote places of Ecuador.

We do not share the criteria of the Minister of Agriculture, constant in revelations for this newspaper, who says that he will face this phenomenon by delivering a package that will include the compensation of private insurance companies, which would never take such a risk, claiming losses of only 27,000 hectares ( plus 600,000 in 1997 and 1998) than would have happened according to official estimates, a figure that does not even cover the damage suffered by rice cultivation in the Daula area, devastated by the forced partial opening of the gates of the Daula-Peripa dams. I am re-examining the study done by CAF that estimated the damage from the 97-98 El Niño.

Grain stocks in private warehouses must be checked; they disappeared public. Creation of stocks that guarantee the supply of the population; if there are none, start creating or increasing them. It is necessary to avoid episodes of hunger with attacks on warehouses that occurred in 1982 and 1983. It is necessary to encourage the planting in higher areas of types of cereals adapted to that environment, once of great value.

The statements of the new minister of public works about the passability of roads to and from plantation areas are encouraging, both for internal mobilization and for the export and import of agricultural goods; But be careful with those coming in from Peru, who could carry Fusarium R4T, the cruel enemy of our bananas and plantations, without this disease. (OR)