Asia’s shaky food supply shudders as ‘super’ El Nino arrives
Every few years, the Pacific runs a fever. This year, it could be worse than anything seen for decades, scientists warn
“There is no way to know for certain,” Koranut Rattanayanyong told This Week in Asia. “But it could be a total wipeout.”
The forecasts emanating from meteorological agencies across the world in the days since have been almost uniform in their alarm.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said on Tuesday that this year’s El Nino “could peak at levels among the highest observed since 1950”. Its US counterpart gave almost two in three odds that it would be “very strong”.
And UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned on June 2 that this year’s event “will hit even harder, travel even farther and cross borders with devastating speed”.
El Nino is a recurring disruption. In essence, one forms when the Pacific Ocean runs a fever, redistributing heat and moisture in ways that can shatter the climatic rhythms on which billions of people depend. It brings drought to some regions, catastrophic flooding to others and the kinds of climatic extremes – hot days, dry soils, then sudden deluges – that can overwhelm crops.
For Asia and its 4.7 billion people – hundreds of millions of whom still live off the land – what comes next could be devastating.
Fuel on the fire
Koranut has spent years building something unusual in the hills of Chiang Mai: a cacao economy.
Growers and grinders, processors and craft chocolatiers, all connected through his company Cocoa Baan Suan, operate a direct, farm-to-wrapper loop that ends in chocolate-coated nuts, dense brownies and bars of trendy “Dubai chocolate”.
This, he wants to show the world, is what rural Thailand could do if it moved up the value chain, from raw commodity to finished product, from subsistence to sophistication.
But cacao trees are highly sensitive to variations in heat and rainfall.
“Even if our water supply is good, if the heat above is that intense, the trees can’t survive,” Koranut said. “If there is waterlogging, the cacao trees will develop fungal problems. And if the yields are down … you can forget about all of this.”
Now, Koranut is waiting for a weather event that could erase it all. And he is far from alone.
El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world
Currencies across the region have also weakened, making food imports more expensive just as domestic production may be about to fall.
“The challenge is compounded … by the energy crisis, supply chain disruptions and the impact of weakening currencies on imports across markets from Indonesia to India,” said Vikash Sharma, director of Godrej International Trading and Investments, a Singapore-based commodity trading house.
“An El Nino of this nature will also have a ripple effect on places like Singapore and Hong Kong, both of which rely heavily on food imports.”
Nowhere, in other words, is likely to escape unscathed.
Ratings agency Fitch has warned of “sustained shortages” accelerating inflation. Futures prices for Arabica coffee, cacao and sugar have all climbed on commodity exchanges in anticipation of the fallout.
“Farm commodity markets are going to be highly volatile,” said Desh Ratna, a commodity market specialist operating out of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City.
“Some parts of the world will experience dryness while others will see more rainfall. This, in turn, will impact yields and result in price spikes.”
That asymmetry may produce its own dislocations: if El Nino damages American soybean output – the foundation of the global animal feed supply – prices could rise across every food category that relies on it.
Some supply loss may be partially offset by farmers in India pivoting from water-hungry crops such as sugar cane and corn towards soybean, as officials there expect. But the overall direction of travel is clear.
From Bangkok to Tokyo, Asia’s cities were already adapting to a warming baseline. Cool rooms are being installed in public spaces. Outdoor workers are being sent home at midday.
“El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” UN chief Guterres warned this month. And the world is not ready.
Here it comes
“We have heard that this kind of weather is coming soon,” the 63-year-old said of the forecasts of unusually dry weather that have begun filtering through to his village. “But the government has not given us any support to prepare for it.”
His most recent harvest has been disrupted by weeks of heavy, unseasonal rain – too much water now, potentially too little later. The local traders paying to buy his grain are offering roughly half the government-mandated price of 3,600 Nepalese rupees (US$24) per 100kg.
That is rapidly eating away at the funds he needs to prepare his fields for the next crop, sown in late June or early July – without even taking into account the water needed to nourish it.
“If conditions are really dry this summer, we will have to resort to boring groundwater,” Puri said. “But if the hot and dry weather gets too intense, even boring does not work.”
A version of the predicament Puri finds himself in – caught between the immediate cruelty of low prices and the gathering threat of a climate event he cannot control – is now playing out among farmers across the continent.
For those who have irrigation, groundwater reserves or dams filled by last year’s rains may be enough to get through, according to Ajay Jakhar, who chairs Bharat Krishak Samaj, a farmers’ welfare organisation based in Punjab, one of India’s most productive agricultural states.
Roughly 45 per cent of the world’s most populous nation – some 660 million people – relies, directly or indirectly, on agriculture.
India’s Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan held a high-level meeting on Tuesday to outline a strategy for dealing with this year’s El Nino by redirecting resources and helping farmers pivot to more drought-resistant crops ahead of the monsoon planting season.
“Full preparations should be made in advance in those districts where there is a possibility of low rainfall or uneven rainfall,” he told the assembled officials present, adding that “weekly meetings will be held” to prepare.
India can boast community-led adaptation models, new irrigation techniques and a track record of feeding its population through shocks that would have caused crises a generation ago.
But the fertiliser shortage triggered by the Strait of Hormuz crisis – only now expected to ease as a US-Iran peace deal edges towards completion – will still be felt in the soil this season. And the heat has already been exceptional this year, even before El Nino arrives in earnest.
“The ongoing extreme heat conditions are causing alarm,” said Devinder Sharma, an independent food and trade policy analyst. “We are expecting El Nino, whose effect would be visible in July or August. This is a deadly combination for India.”
Should New Delhi’s confidence in its own resilience turns out to be misplaced, the consequences could spiral far beyond its borders.
“If there is any doubt about production, India will stop exporting food,” Jakhar said.
In a year when harvests are already under threat from Thailand to Indonesia to Vietnam, an export ban by India – one of the world’s largest food and agricultural exporters and its leading producer of rice – would land like a tonne of bricks on global markets.
‘We have to fight’
Back in Chiang Mai, Koranut’s son Pinyawat thinks about the ecosystem his father has spent years building as the rain patters down.
“Really, we’re just getting started,” he said, sharing his hope that one day, cacao could become a valuable cash crop for the region.
Thailand produces around 1,500 to 2,000 tonnes of cacao each year: a fraction of the 600,000 tonnes produced by Indonesia, the world’s No 3 producer behind only the Ivory Coast and Ghana.
“But if the climate works against us, the yields won’t justify the costs,” Pinyawat said.
His father is more defiant, though not naively so. He talks about planting shade trees to protect the smaller cacao plants from direct heat, about new irrigation technology that might carry the crop through the driest stretches.
“Every problem has a solution,” Koranut said. “We just have to keep solving it … We have to fight.”