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Aidan Jones

Biman Mukherji

In the mist-wrapped hills of northern Thailand, where cacao trees erupt from the rich, nutrient-dense soil, three little words are spreading fear through a community of farmers.
“There is no way to know for certain,” Koranut Rattanayanyong told This Week in Asia. “But it could be a total wipeout.”
The weather event Koranut is dreading? A “super” El Nino.
Earlier this month, the climate phenomenon officially started to form over the Pacific, with a bloom of ocean heat running 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal temperatures.
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.

A “super” event, scientists warn, would do all of that and more, across a wider geography, with greater intensity, for longer. It has levelled harvests before: a decade ago, a super El Nino devastated Indian soybean yields, Thai rice, Vietnam’s Robusta coffee crop and the palm oil output of both Indonesia and Malaysia.
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.
In Pakistan, agriculture accounts for around 24 per cent of gross domestic product; in Laos, a similar share; in India, the government estimates that roughly 145 million people farm for a living, making up 16 per cent of the entire economy.
Even Southeast Asian industrial powerhouses such as Indonesia and Vietnam, not often thought of as agrarian economies, still depend on agriculture for 14 and 13 per cent of their output, respectively.
El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres
This year’s super El Nino is arriving against a troubling backdrop. Sky-high fertiliser and fuel prices, a result of supply disruptions caused by the US-Israel war on Iran, led many Asian farmers to use less than needed this planting season.
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.
Last year’s record temperatures extracted a grim toll in heatstroke deaths that governments are not eager to repeat.
The Philippines, perennially battered by Pacific storm systems, is steeling itself for a more violent typhoon season. Across Asia, conservationists are sounding alarms about biodiversity corridors that could be severed by wildfires if this year’s dry season turns extreme.
“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
In Nepal’s Chitwan district, not far from the flat agricultural plains that stretch south towards the Indian border, Ramesh Chandra Puri is worried about his summer rice crop.
“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.
“The problem, however, is with farmers’ livelihoods in rain-fed areas such as Vidarbha in Maharashtra,” he said. Vidarbha, a region long associated in India with agrarian distress, severe debt and high rates of farmer suicides, does not need another bad season.

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.”


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Extreme weather

Illustration: Huy Truong

A tropical storm forms over the Pacific Ocean on June 3. El Nino tends to intensify Asia’s tropical storms. Photo: CIRA/NOAA/AP

A worker is seen in a sugar cane field in Thailand’s Ratchaburi province in 2016, during a previous “super” El Nino event. Photo: Reuters

Cacao pods on a cacao tree at Cocoa Baan Suan farm in the Sankamphaeng district of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo: Aidan Jones

A butcher speaks to customers at a fresh food market in Hong Kong on June 10. Photo: AFP

A woman walks in a field in Nepal after planting rice in 2021, a year with adequate rainfall. Photo: EPA-EFE

A farmer and his wife harvest radishes in fields outside New Delhi in temperatures near 40 degrees Celsius earlier this month. Photo: AFP

A Indian farmer sprinkles organic biofertiliser on a field in Bichpuri village, Uttar Pradesh, on June 9. Photo: AFP

Koranut Rattanayanyong at his cacao farm in the San Kamphaeng district of Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo: Aidan Jones

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The sun sets behind power lines in San Fernando town, Pampanga province, the Philippines, last month. Photo: AFP

A Vinfast electric car on a street of Hanoi. Rising demand for EVs is placing extra strain on national power grids. Photo: EPA-EFE

Workers seen on a construction site for data centre in Malaysia’s Johor state in 2024. Photo: AP

Solar panels on the rooftop of the Marina barrage in Singapore. The Asia-Pacific region generates nearly half the world’s renewable electricity. Photo: AFP

A man walks across the cracked bed of a dried-up pond in Vietnam’s southern Ben Tre province in 2024. Photo: AFP

Climate collapse: Southeast Asia’s new normal?

Stupas are seen in a flooded Buddhist temple in Ayutthaya province, central Thailand. Photo: AFP

An elderly woman traverses floodwaters in an Ayutthaya neighbourhood after heavy rains. Photo: AFP

A man rests on the roof of his submerged house on the banks of a flooded river in Ayutthaya province last month. Photo: Reuters

The world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases did not send heads of state to the Cop30 summit in Brazil. Photo: AP

Floodwaters inundate streets and buildings following heavy rains in Hoi An, Vietnam on October 30. Photo: AFP

A diver documents the extent of coral bleaching at a reef in Malaysia. Photo: Reef Check Malaysia

Rescuers pull an inflatable boat loaded with residents during a forced evacuation in Cagayan province, the Philippines, on November 11 following Super Typhoon Fung-wong. Photo:  AFP

Southeast Asia warned of ‘Godzilla El Nino’ whiplash threatening drought, floods, haze

A man shields his face from the sunlight as he leaves a train station in Bangkok, Thailand, on April 29. Photo: AFP

A farm worker sprays fertiliser on a paddy field in Malaysia. Rising heat brings more intense storms, putting pressure on drainage systems and threatening rice and palm oil production across the Asia-Pacific. Photo: EPA

Firefighters at the scene of a fire at a peatland forest in Indonesia. Southeast Asia is facing the prospect of strong El Nino conditions that could spike energy demand, sap hydropower and damage crops. Photo: AFP

Young girls cool off on a fountain next to a park in Manila, the Philippines, on April 9. Recent geopolitical tensions have left some Southeast Asian governments less able to absorb climate shocks. Photo: AFP

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Every few years, the Pacific runs a fever. This year, it could be worse than anything seen for decades, scientists warn


Every few years, the Pacific runs a fever. This year, it could be worse than anything seen for decades, scientists warn.


Asia’s shaky food supply shudders as ‘super’ El Nino arrives

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Every few years, the Pacific runs a fever. This year, it could be worse than anything seen for decades, scientists warn

Every few years, the Pacific runs a fever. This year, it could be worse than anything seen for decades, scientists warn