‘There Will Be No Food in Puerto Rico’

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

“How do you calculate everything?” he said. As far as he could see, all of his 14,000 trees were down. Same for the yam and sweet pepper crops.

His neighbor, Luis A. Pinto Cruz, 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.”

Hurricane Maria made landfall here on September 20 as a Category 4 storm. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Maria wiped out about 80 percent of the crop value in Puerto Rico — making it one of the costliest storms to hit the island’s agriculture industry, said Carlos Flores Ortega, Puerto Rico’s secretary of the Department of Agriculture.

Maria’s barrage took out entire plantations and destroyed dairy barns and industrial chicken coops. Plantain, banana and coffee crops were the hardest hit, Mr. Flores said. Landslides in the mountainous interior of the island took out roads, a major part of the agriculture infra- structure there.

The island suffered a loss of $780 million in agriculture yields, according to the department’s preliminary figures. Hurricane Irma, which only grazed the island, took out about $45 million.

For over 400 years, Puerto Rico’s economy was based on agriculture. The economy industrialized after World War II, leading to the downfall of agriculture production. In recent years, in part because of economic recession, people went back to the fields, and the industry has been growing 3 to 5 percent every year over the past six years, Mr. Flores said.

Puerto Rico already imports about 85 percent of its food, and now its imports are certain to rise drastically. “Sometimes when there are shortages, the price of plantain goes up from $1 to $1.25. This time, there won’t be any price increase; there won’t be any product,” Mr. Rivera said. He noted that other islands that export food to Puerto Rico, such as the Dominican Republic and St. Martin, were also hit.

Mr. Ortiz said he had been working these fields for seven decades. “I have never seen losses like these in any of my 80 years,” he said as he counted the number of coconut trees that fell.

Efrain M. Robles Menendez, a dairy farmer, said cattle ranchers had been hit hard, because not only was there damage to the infrastructure needed to maintain the business, but the supply chain was also cut off, with stores closed and the power out. Since the storm hit, “I have thrown out 4,000 liters of milk a day,” he said.

Some see the potential for something positive. Mr. Flores said much of the agriculture had depended on inefficient practices. Federal funds will present an opportunity to improve the industry, he said.

But long-term optimism does little to help farmers contemplating the destruction around them. Mr. Pinto’s 14,000 plantain trees are dead. He also lost all of his cattle.

Mr. Pinto, 62, plans to start over. He will get about 35 percent of the value back from insurance. He used an expression that has become a popular hashtag: #yonomequito — I will not give up.

“A people without agriculture,” he said, “are a people without food.”

An island’s farmers begin to assess the damage of a storm.