KVIG Informative

Rice yields across South Asia and East Africa could fall by as much as half this year. The people least able to absorb that loss live in the countries most exposed to it.

The U.S. Climate Prediction Center said on July 9 that El Niño is strengthening rapidly, with an 81% chance of becoming one of the most powerful events since 1950. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed the pattern has already developed and forecast it will intensify through September, with a likely peak between October and December. Equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures are already at record levels for this point in the year.

The International Rescue Committee named Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan as the countries most at risk, several of them already managing separate humanitarian crises. Bob Kitchen, the IRC’s senior official for emergencies, said the agency is watching several emergencies converge at once in places least equipped to absorb another shock.

The damage has already started. At least 15 Rohingya refugees have been killed and more than 10,000 displaced by landslides and flooding in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar refugee camps since early July. Pakistan faces the opposite problem in different regions at once: below-average rainfall broadly, paired with sudden glacier-melt flood risk in its northern mountains as temperatures climb.

The World Bank has warned that a fully developed El Niño could cut rice yields by 20% to 50% across the hardest-hit parts of South Asia and East Africa. Rice is the staple crop underpinning food security for hundreds of millions of people in that belt. A yield loss at the upper end of that range would not be a bad season. It would be a regional food crisis.

Fertilizer costs are compounding the problem. Prices have already climbed sharply this year, and Al Jazeera reports the increase is tied in part to the war around the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for both energy and fertilizer shipments now disrupted by strikes between the United States, Israel and Iran. Farmers in the countries most exposed to El Niño’s yield losses are also facing higher costs to fight them.

Southeast Asia is already logging the consequences in real time. The ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre’s disaster tracking recorded 20 separate flood, drought, landslide and storm events across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam in the week of July 6 to 12 alone. In the Philippines, Tropical Cyclone Bavi combined with an enhanced monsoon to affect roughly 738,000 people, killing 21 and displacing more than 15,000. Indonesia is simultaneously logging drought across five provinces.

Scientists describe this as a natural cycle layered on top of a warming baseline that makes each occurrence worse than the last. The IRC’s message is not a forecast. It is a warning that the emergency has already started, in camps and farm regions that had no reserve capacity left before this cycle began.