A dangerous El Niño could turn hunger into famine
The phrase "hunger could turn into famine" should make us sit up straight. When aid groups reach for that word, they're telling us the ordinary coping mechanisms, local markets, emergency shipments, family networks, have already failed. That's a warning we ignore at our own cost.
El Niño is wiry because it hits several regions at once, drying out some and flooding others. The usual fallback of shipping grain from a surplus area to a deficit area gets harder when every major producer is struggling. I'd want to know exactly which countries are expected to see the biggest crop failures and how much money is needed to pre-position food and cash transfers before the season turns bad. Early action is cheaper than a famine response, but donors often hold back because the forecasts are probabilistic, not certain.
That hesitation has a real price. We've seen this movie in 1997 and 2015, and the pattern repeats: warnings come early, funding arrives late, and millions of people pay the difference. This time, the choice is a bit more visible, and I think we owe it to those millions to act on what we already know.