After Hurricane Melissa’s exceptionally strong winds subsided, the roots of breadfruit trees clung deep into the fertile Jamaican soil, offering hope and a step toward future food security.

For the past 16 years, Mary and Mike McLaughlin—Jamaican natives who now reside in Winnetka—have helped plant almost half a million fruit trees across the Caribbean and Africa, with about 250,000 of those in Jamaica alone. Most of these are breadfruit trees, a crop known for its resilience but long underutilized as a food source, according to Mary McLaughlin.

The couple’s Trees That Feed Foundation aims to expand breadfruit cultivation in areas vulnerable to extreme weather events that are intensifying due to human-induced climate change. Several scientific analyses found that Hurricane Melissa was made more likely and intense by global warming from fossil fuels.

“It’s one of the worst hurricanes—well, it’s the worst hurricane ever—in the Caribbean country,” Mary McLaughlin told the Tribune, “and it hit Jamaica in its breadbasket,” referring to the southwestern parish of St. Elizabeth. This region, known for its fertile soil, is essential for crops that feed the country. Having planted trees in the area, the foundation anticipates some losses.

“However, we have worked in countries that have had hurricanes and seen recovery, and if the trees have roots in the ground, those trees will recover. And we know we may miss a bearing season, but the following year, they will produce,” Mary McLaughlin explained. She also noted that these trees “lock carbon away while feeding people,” thus addressing the root causes of increasingly destructive weather events.

Jamaicans are now coping with the aftermath of a hurricane so severe that it ties with a 1935 storm as the third strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, and the most intense to make landfall in the country. Rita Hilton, who has lived in Jamaica for 60 years and works with the McLaughlins to help farmers export their crops, called Hurricane Melissa “the most intense, horrific storm” she has experienced.

Hilton was airlifted to Kingston, the country’s capital, this week after seven days spent in her isolated, damaged home. “If you look at all the forest trees, there’s not a green leaf; there are tree stumps sticking out of the ground or lying across the road,” she told the Tribune. “Whatever crops were in the ground have been destroyed in that area.” However, not all is lost—especially where those stumps belong to breadfruit trees.

“In times of disaster such as this, when a lot of agricultural produce is damaged, we need things that can actually survive,” she said. Local papers have written about people eating breadfruit after the storm, as food supply routes have suffered with roads impassable. “The breadfruit trees that did come down,” Hilton added, “have been a godsend for some communities.”

As Jamaica recovers, replanting more trees will be crucial to ensuring food security. In the next few months, a new grant from the foundation will fund the planting of at least 15,000 trees in Jamaica, the McLaughlins said.

Years of partnership between the foundation and Jamaica’s Forestry Department began when the latter started replanting native forests, mostly timber trees such as blue mahoe and mahogany, which are better adapted to withstand strong winds. “The plan is to use more and more natives in our reforestation programs and to transition some of the existing areas that have a high percentage of nonnative species,” said Henry, the head of the Forestry Department. “This will increase the resilience of these spaces, particularly in light of the obvious and current problem of hurricanes in Jamaica.”

The couple also approached the local government about distributing fruit trees, which offer the additional benefit of providing a reliable harvest year after year, without the need to replant. After moving to the United States for Mike McLaughlin’s job as an actuary in 1978, the McLaughlins settled in the Chicago area a decade later. Their connection to Jamaica remained strong—especially in the early 2000s, when they felt compelled to act on the climate crisis and its consequences for island nations like their homeland. From this sense of urgency, Trees That Feed Foundation was born.

In Jamaica, the partnership works by having the foundation provide grants to the Forestry Department, which in turn buys cuttings from local plant nurseries and distributes them to small farmers at no cost. “We do get our hands dirty, but us two little people can’t plant half a million trees,” Mike McLaughlin said. “We work with farmers. They really know what they’re doing.”

“So we don’t go in and impose,” Mary McLaughlin added. The farmers want a sense of ownership over the trees, she noted, which also supports small businesses that can grow from selling the fruit.

The program supports both food security and income generation, said Henry of the Forestry Department. “You heard of win-win? Well, this is win-win-win-win,” Mike McLaughlin said. “The win is nutrition. The win is the environment. And the win is the economy. And our donors are generous people, and I would say they are winning too. They want to help, and we give them a way to help that is very efficient.”
https://www.bostonherald.com/2025/11/14/hurricane-melissa-jamaica-breadfruit-climate-change/