"Puerto Rico’s Agriculture and Farmers Decimated by Maria"

"YABUCOA, P.R. — José A. Rivera, a farmer on the southeast coast of Puerto Rico, stood in the middle of his flattened plantain farm on Sunday and tried to tally how much Hurricane Maria had cost him.

'How do you calculate everything?' Mr. Rivera said.

For as far as he could see, every one of his 14,000 trees was down. Same for the yam and sweet pepper crops. His neighbor, Luis A. Pinto Cruz, known to everyone here as 'Piña,' figures he is out about $300,000 worth of crops. The foreman down the street, Félix Ortiz Delgado, spent the afternoon scrounging up the scraps that were left of the farm he manages. He found about a dozen dried ears of corn that he could feed the chickens. The wind had claimed the rest.

'There will be no food in Puerto Rico,' Mr. Rivera predicted. 'There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.'"

Frances Robles and Luis Ferré-Sadurní report for the New York Times September 24, 2017.