El Nino is About to Make Food Insecurity Even Worse Simeon Tegel - Global Post
go to original August 16, 2012

El Nino cometh: A boy plays with a paddle on the dried bed of the Negro river in northern Brazil in October 2010, when the El Nino climate phenomenon struck. It's a complicated phenomenon that hits different regions in different ways. (Euzivaldo Queiroz/AFP/Getty Images)

LIMA, Peru — With global food prices spiking thanks to the US drought, El Nino was the last thing the world needed.

But now meteorologists are warning that the phenomenon, which sees unusually warm waters in the Pacific cause freak weather from California to Australia, is under way.

In the last 10 days, the national weather agencies of the US, Japan, Australia, India and Peru, among others, have confirmed the first effects of El Nino in the eastern Pacific.

In the past, El Nino has caused massive disruption to agriculture around the Pacific Rim.

In a statement, the Climate Prediction Center, a US agency of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said it now expected the early signs to develop into a full-blown El Nino during August or September as higher water temperatures translate into warmer air currents.

That is expected to inject new levels of uncertainty into global food markets as heat waves and drought grip the eastern Pacific while increased rains, and some flooding, could hit the Americas.

“It is a mild El Nino but that doesn’t imply that its effects will not be felt,” Concepcion Calpe, chief economist at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told GlobalPost.

“Stocks are at very low levels of certain crops and any bad weather or other shocks in the next few months could lead to price volatility.”

Although global rice stocks are relatively healthy at the moment, corn, soy, sugar and wheat production have plummeted thanks to the unprecedented drought that has hit much of the United States.

The crisis has been so intense in the Midwest, with entire harvests lost due to the lack of rain, that it has prompted the Obama administration to buy up $170 million of pork, chicken, lamb and catfish to hand out to stricken farmers and their families.

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