The cracks in the walls of Eliseo Cardenas Carhuapuma’s adobe house in Peru are so deep that he is afraid for his son to play inside. The family has moved its scant possessions outdoors, rigging up a straw mat to shield them from the damp morning air.

Like many people whose homes were damaged or destroyed in the earthquake that struck Peru Aug. 15, Cardenas and his wife, Nancy Cabrera Hernandez, had little to start with. Now they must rebuild. “There is no justice in this world,” he said.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, droughts and floods leave searing images of desperate people who have lost what little they had. They also raise a question: Why do the poor suffer most from natural disasters?

The answer may seem obvious. When the house, crops and livestock are swept away, a poor family loses its savings and sole means of livelihood. But the problem goes deeper. In fact, experts say, the question is wrong.

“The disasters are not natural,” said Guido Eguiguren, who heads the Honduras office of Action by Churches Together. “The phenomenon may be natural, but the disaster is the result of human action.”

Examples include bridges or dams that are built without taking into consideration water flow when precipitation is unseasonably high, or a road built at the foot of a hillside that has been stripped of trees, where the next heavy rain may trigger a landslide.

Eguiguren cited the case of a banana and palm oil plantation whose owners built a higher retention wall along the left bank of a river after Hurricane Mitch swept through Honduras in 1998. In subsequent storms, when the water rose, instead of following its natural leftward course, the river was forced over the right bank, where low-income residents had built their homes.

That underscores another problem: the inherent inequality of these unnatural disasters. People who have money can hire architects and engineers, buy land on high ground or in a safe place, follow building codes and obtain insurance.

Those who barely scrape by “build as they can, using their own means, and with no technical oversight,” said Pedro Ferradas, manager of the disaster prevention and local governance program for Practical Solutions-Intermediate Technology Development Group in Lima, Peru.

Priced out of safe urban areas, the poor build on unstable hillsides, flood plains, sandy areas or old landfills, fashioning their dwellings out of inexpensive materials that also may be unsafe. Most of the buildings that collapsed during the two-minute earthquake in Peru were constructed from mud bricks that had been made by hand and dried in the sun.

Adobe houses can be made more earthquake-resistant. Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ international relief and development agency, sponsors a program in Ecuador to help rural residents reinforce their homes. But Ferradas said information about such methods has not been widely disseminated in the rural Andes, so it is rarely used.

But reinforcing buildings is only part of the solution. In Peru and other Latin American countries, “cities grow exponentially” with little or no urban planning, Ferradas said. Planning for housing in rural areas is even worse. If policies do exist, they are designed for formal building, but 70 percent of the housing in Peru is built informally by people who occupy land and then gradually construct a dwelling as they can afford to purchase materials.

Policymakers must take into account the real costs of disasters. Not only do they take lives and destroy infrastructure, but they also exacerbate economic problems. In rural areas, natural disasters are among the key events that push families over the brink into poverty, Ferradas said.

But policies alone are not enough to reduce the damage to people’s lives, property and dreams when earthquakes or hurricanes strike the region, Eguiguren said.

As long as the concepts of progress and development depend on the unbridled consumption of natural resources and the gap between the rich and the poor widens, natural phenomena will take an ever higher toll, he said.

“There are both theological and ecological principles at work,” he said. “Natural resources were given to human beings to use wisely, but the wealth of the earth has been expropriated by a small group of people. There are limits to how long nature can withstand the actions of human beings.”