Drought affects a quarter of humanity, says the UN, and is disrupting lives worldwide

Pandemic. War. Now drought.

In Tunisia, the olive groves have shriveled. The Brazilian Amazon is facing its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, leaving millions more people hungry after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a crucial trade artery, does not have enough water, meaning fewer ships can pass through. And fears of drought have prompted India, the world’s largest rice exporter, to restrict exports of most rice varieties.

The United Nations estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or almost a quarter of humanity, lived under drought in 2022 and 2023, with the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries. “Droughts operate silently, often go unnoticed and do not provoke an immediate public and political response,” Ibrahim Thiaw, head of the United Nations agency that published the estimates late last year, wrote in his foreword to the report.

The many droughts around the world come at a time of record high global temperatures and rising food price inflation, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, involving two countries that are major wheat producers, has thrown global food supply chains into turmoil, leaving the world’s poorest people .

The price of rice, the staple grain for the majority of the world’s population, reached its highest level since the 2008 global financial crisis in 2023, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Some of today’s abnormally dry, hot conditions are made worse by the burning of fossil fuels that cause climate change. In Syria and Iraq, for example, three-year droughts would have been highly unlikely without the pressures of climate change, scientists recently concluded. The arrival last year of El Niño, a natural, cyclical weather phenomenon characterized by warmer-than-normal temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean, most likely also contributed.

The memories of the last El Niño, between 2014 and 2016, are fresh. At that time, Southeast Asia witnessed a sharp decline in rice yields, pushing millions of people into food insecurity.

What is different this time is record levels of hunger, due to an economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, exacerbated by wars in Ukraine and Gaza. A record 258 million people are facing what the United Nations calls “acute hunger,” with some on the brink of starvation.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a research group funded by the U.S. government, estimates that the ongoing El Niño will impact crop yields. at least a quarter of the world’s agricultural land.

If the past is any guide, say researchers from FewsNeta research firm funded by the US government, El Niño combined with global climate change could dampen rice yields in Southeast Asia, a region where rice is central to every meal.

Rice is acutely vulnerable to the weather, and governments in turn are acutely vulnerable to fluctuations in rice prices. This helps explain why Indonesia, which faced elections this year, has recently taken action to boost rice imports. It also explains why India, which also faces elections this year, has imposed a series of export duties, minimum prices and outright export bans on its rice.

India’s rice export ban is a precautionary measure. The government has long held large stocks in reserve and offered rice to the poor at deep discounts. The export restrictions help keep prices further low and, in a country where hundreds of millions of voters rely on rice, they temper political risks for incumbent lawmakers.

But India is the world’s largest rice exporter and its limitations are being felt elsewhere. Rice prices have soared in countries that have become dependent on Indian rice, such as Senegal and Nigeria.

Previous El Niños have also been bad news for corn in two regions that depend on them: Southern Africa and Central America. That is bad for the small farmers in those regions, many of whom already make a subsistence living and struggle with already high food prices.

Droughts in Central America affect more than just food. In a region where violence and economic uncertainty are driving millions of people to migrate north to the United States, a recent study shows that drought could weigh heavily on the scale. It was accompanied by unusually dry years greater levels of migration from Central America to the United States, that study showed.

Along the Panama Canal, dry conditions forced shipping giant Moller-Maersk to say Thursday it would bypass the canal entirely and use trains instead. Further south, a drought in the Brazilian Amazon has made drinking water scarce and river traffic halted due to extremely low water levels.

The drought in Brazil also poses more far-reaching dangers. A healthy Amazon rainforest is a huge store of carbon, but not when heat and drought kill trees and fuel wildfires. “If that goes into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, it could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for the global climate,” said Philip Fearnside, a biologist at the Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil. “Not just the Amazon.”