How El Nino is threatening China’s food-security drive

Name: El Nino is here, and it’s quite worrying, according to climate scientists
Uploaded: 2023-06-17T12:00:11.000Z
Duration: 2 min 50 s
Description: El Nino is here, and it’s quite worrying, according to climate scientists

Mother Nature has been throwing a lot of extreme weather at China, and it is expected to intensify as the El Nino climate pattern could make 2023 the hottest year ever

Worsening floods in the south and droughts in the north could have a devastating effect on agriculture, manufacturing and China’s economy at large

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Extreme weather has taken a toll on China’s agriculture, including last year’s months-long drought in Jiangxi province (pictured), a major rice-growing region. Photo: Reuters

Mia Nurmamat

Published: 8:00pm, 17 Jun 2023

A rise in natural disasters associated with abnormal and extreme weather is threatening to hinder China’s agricultural-security drive, and this outsized threat demands that the country ramp up efforts to deal with the coming uncertainties, according to climate specialists.

Take, for example, the early and potentially devastating arrival of the El Nino climate pattern. Last week, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the start of the phenomenon that could last for eight to 10 months and is expected to gradually strengthen into the Northern Hemisphere winter that stretches into next year.

This is likely to mark the return of “floods in the southern regions and droughts in the north” in China, according to Zhou Bing, chief climate officer with the China Meteorological Administration.

“El Nino has had a big impact on agriculture since its emergence, with soybean futures prices falling during the period and having an impact on yields of wheat, corn, rice and more,” Zhou said on Tuesday.

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El Nino is here, and it’s quite worrying, according to climate scientists

El Nino and its counterpart, La Nina, are climate patterns that begin in the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years, on average. The last strong El Nino occurred in 2016, and in 1998 it was so impactful that it led to China’s worst flooding in decades, with reported direct economic losses of 255.1 billion yuan, or 3 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) that year.