THE South African Weather Service said on Monday it expects an El Nino to hit southern Africa at the end of the year, bringing yet another dry spell after a disappointing harvest already this year.
”Indications are showing that an El Nino is coming and the data we are getting month after month shows it is underway,” Melton Mugeri, a meteorologist at the South African Weather Service, told Reuters.
”It is very bad news indeed. The sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are expected to peak towards the end of this year. An El Nino is clearly on the way,” he said.
The U.N. World Food Programme is busy estimating how many people it has to feed in six southern African countries where summer crops have failed largely because of adverse weather, but also because of political turmoil and poor planning.
The WFP’s regional director for east and southern Africa, Judith Lewis, said in April that the scale of disaster if crops failed again in the coming season would be ”unimaginable”.
The WFP is already feeding 2.6 million people in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia. Zimbabwe and Lesotho have declared states of disaster because of food shortages.
Some 500 people have died in Malawi from starvation and related illnesses in the fourth months to March, the state said. The WFP estimates 1.1 million Zambians need food aid this year.
Zimbabwe, wracked by political turmoil since early 2000, may have to import around 1.5 million tonnes of maize and aid agencies estimate more than a million people are going hungry.
There are shortages in Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland.
LIMITED MAIZE SUPPLY
Grain SA, the umbrella body for South African grain farmers, said a drought next season would drive hundreds of farmers out of business and further stretch already limited food supplies.
”We will have enough maize for our own domestic use. But, under our free market system, guys will buy maize for export to our northern neighbour and South Africa will have to import maize. The last thing we need is another drought,” said Grain SA chairman Bully Botma.
”We are on a knife’s edge in South Africa with maize supply,” he added.
South Africa exported 96,000 tonnes of maize in March, bringing the total for the 2001/02 marketing year (May – April) so far to 1.24 million tonnes, the majority of which went to African countries, according to South Africa Grain Information Service data.
Grain SA’s supply and demand projections suggest total exports this marketing year of 1.31 million tonnes of maize, with 200,000 tonnes going to Malawi and Zambia, 60,000 tonnes to Zimbabwe and 50,000 tonnes to Mozambique.
Food aid organisations would take 20,000 tonnes.
South Africa is expected to produce 8.5 million tonnes of maize for the 2002/03 marketing year compared to 7.2 million tonnes for the 2001/02 season. Domestic demand is seen around 7.8 million tonnes this year.
In an El Nino year the region might have brief rain at the end of winter and then nothing more during the summer season, Mugeri told Reuters.
Southern Africa relies heavily on summer rains at the end of the year and into the new year for mainly maize crops to keep going through the dry winter.
Rains have failed over the region this summer season because of a high pressure system over southern Africa that kept precipitation at bay, he said.
Meteorologists will meet in Tanzania at the Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum in September and could issue an El Nino warning then, Mugeri said. The intensity of the El Nino is difficult to forecast.
El Nino — literally ”boy child” in Spanish — is an abnormal warming of waters in the Pacific and its recurrence roughly each three years can cause drought in some countries and floods in others.
Southern Africa was stricken by El Ninos in 1981/82, 1991/92 and 1997/98. – Reuters