The World Food Programme has published a number that reads like an accounting error. Across the forty-five countries it monitors, the population facing acute food insecurity could rise from about 225 million people to 274 million by the end of 2027.
That is an increase of 49 million people — roughly the population of Spain — driven substantially by a climate pattern that meteorologists have been able to see coming since the spring.
Which raises the question this story is actually about. If you can forecast a famine months in advance, what stops you from preventing it?
What the forecast says
On 2 June 2026, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed an 80 per cent likelihood that El Niño conditions would persist through June to August, with odds near 90 per cent of continuing to at least November. Models pointed to at least moderate intensity and, in the WMO’s phrasing, possibly strong — comparable to the 2023–24 event, among the five strongest on record.
“We need to prepare for a potentially strong El Niño event,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
El Niño is a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific that reorganises rainfall worldwide. It typically dries southern Africa, Central America and parts of Asia while bringing heavier rain elsewhere. It develops between March and June, runs nine to twelve months, and peaks between November and February.
The important property, for humanitarian purposes, is that it is predictable. Unlike an earthquake or a sudden conflict, this is a slow-moving shock with a known signature and months of warning.
Where the 49 million are
The WFP’s 5 August analysis breaks the projected increase down by region:
- Central America — more than 16 million people affected, a proportional increase of 83.1 per cent. The Dry Corridor running through Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador is acutely sensitive to rainfall failure, and its smallholder farmers have minimal buffer.
- East and Southern Africa — more than 18 million additional people, an increase of about 26 per cent. Lower in percentage terms, far larger in absolute numbers.
The baseline these figures sit on is already historic. The Global Report on Food Crises 2026, published on 24 April by FAO and WFP with partners, found 266 million people across 47 countries and territories facing acute food insecurity during 2025 — including confirmed famine in Gaza and in parts of Sudan simultaneously, the first time the report has recorded two concurrent famines since it began.
El Niño is not arriving into a stable system. It is arriving on top of one already carrying more weight than it was built for.
It reaches wealthy countries too
A World Economic Forum roundup published on 12 August noted that extreme heat and drought could reduce UK cereal and oilseed production by up to 2.5 million tonnes, at an estimated cost to British farmers of around $526 million.
The difference is not exposure but absorption. A British arable farm facing a poor harvest deals with insurance claims, subsidies and debt. A smallholder in the Guatemalan Dry Corridor facing the same rainfall failure deals with hunger, then with the sale of livestock and land, then with migration. Same meteorology, entirely different consequence, determined by what sits underneath.
The bet on acting early
On 18 June 2026, FAO and WFP launched a joint $202 million appeal to protect 8.8 million people across 22 priority countries in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America — before the worst impacts arrive rather than after.
This is “anticipatory action”: pre-positioning cash, drought-tolerant seed, water infrastructure and livestock feed on the strength of a forecast, when the crisis is still probabilistic.
“Early action is more effective and less costly than responding after a crisis has escalated,” said FAO Deputy Director-General Beth Bechdol.
The supporting arithmetic is striking: WFP and FAO estimate that every $1 invested in anticipatory action saves $3 to $7 in avoided humanitarian losses. Emergency response is expensive because by the time it is needed, families have already sold the assets that would have let them recover on their own.
By August, anticipatory plans had been triggered in six countries — South Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Uganda, Guatemala and El Salvador — deploying more than $14 million to reach 500,000 people.
Read those two figures against the appeal: $14 million disbursed against $202 million requested; 500,000 people reached against 8.8 million targeted. The mechanism is working. It is working at roughly seven per cent of the scale its designers asked for.
Why the cheaper option keeps losing
If early action saves three to seven times its cost, its chronic underfunding looks irrational. It is better understood as structural.
Humanitarian funding is overwhelmingly mobilised by evidence of suffering — images, casualty figures, declared emergencies. Anticipatory action asks donors to release money before any of that exists, on a probability. If the forecast is right and the intervention works, the crisis does not happen, and there is no photograph of the famine that was averted. Success is indistinguishable from a false alarm.
The incentives therefore run against prevention even when the economics run strongly in its favour. That is not a criticism of any individual donor; it is a description of how the system generates urgency.
What credible people disagree about
There is little dispute about the meteorology. The disagreement is about causation and therefore about response.
FAO and WFP leadership — Bechdol, Acting Executive Director Carl Skau, Chief Economist Máximo Torero — frame this as an urgent and substantially preventable crisis if donors fund early. “El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions already vulnerable,” Skau said. Torero’s advice to governments was blunt: “Do not wait. Governments can reduce the damage by investing early in resilient seeds…”
The WMO’s framing is narrower and strictly meteorological, flagging forecast confidence and intensity while leaving humanitarian assessment to the agencies whose remit it is.
A third view, reflected in World Bank commentary on countries such as Bangladesh, holds that El Niño is better understood as a compounding factor than a standalone driver — interacting with fertiliser and seed-supply disruption, debt distress and currency weakness. On this reading the eventual toll will depend at least as much on parallel economic conditions as on rainfall, and food-security policy should target the economic vulnerabilities rather than the weather.
These are not mutually exclusive. They imply different places to spend the next dollar.
The timeline
- September to December 2026 — El Niño expected to peak.
- Through 2027 — humanitarian consequences continue; the 274 million projection is dated to the end of that year.
- Now — WFP and FAO are seeking a further $167 million beyond the initial $202 million appeal.
- 2027 — the next Global Report on Food Crises, the first to capture this El Niño’s effects, is expected.
By the time that report is published, the question of whether the forecast was actionable will have been answered. The forecast existed in June 2026. What is being decided now is what was done with it.
The physics, briefly
El Niño is worth understanding mechanically, because the mechanism is what makes it forecastable.
In normal conditions, trade winds blow westward across the tropical Pacific, pushing warm surface water toward Indonesia and allowing cold water to well up off South America. That temperature contrast drives the atmospheric circulation the whole region’s rainfall depends on.
During El Niño, the trade winds weaken. Warm water sloshes back eastward. The upwelling of cold water off South America diminishes. The zone of deep convection — where warm ocean drives rising air and heavy rain — shifts thousands of kilometres east.
Rainfall follows the convection. Regions that normally sit under the rising branch, including Indonesia, eastern Australia, southern Africa and Central America, find themselves under descending air, which suppresses rain. Parts of South America and the southern United States get the opposite.
The reason this is predictable months ahead is that the ocean’s heat content changes slowly. Subsurface warm water moving eastward across the Pacific is measurable by buoy arrays and satellites before its atmospheric effects appear. The ocean commits before the sky responds — which is exactly the window anticipatory action is designed to use.
What anticipatory action buys, concretely
The phrase is abstract; the interventions are not, and their specificity is the point.
Drought-tolerant seed, distributed before planting. Once a season is planted with the wrong variety, the opportunity is gone for a year. Timing is everything.
Cash transfers, before assets are sold. This is the central mechanism. A household facing hunger sells what it can — livestock first, then tools, then land. Those sales happen at the worst possible prices, because everyone is selling at once. A household that sells its breeding stock does not simply have a bad year; it loses the productive base it would have recovered on. Cash arriving before the distress sale preserves that base.
Livestock feed and water points. Keeping animals alive through a dry season protects a pastoralist household’s entire capital stock.
Destocking at fair prices. Buying animals early, at reasonable value, rather than letting herders sell into a collapsed market.
Water infrastructure repair, done while there is still time to do it.
The three-to-seven-fold return figure is largely explained by that asset-preservation logic. Emergency food aid keeps someone alive. It does not give them back the goats.
How famine is actually declared
The word is used loosely in coverage and has a technical definition, which is worth knowing because it explains why declarations lag reality.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) runs from Phase 1, minimal, to Phase 5, catastrophe or famine. A famine declaration requires all three of the following in an area: at least 20 per cent of households facing an extreme food gap; at least 30 per cent of children acutely malnourished; and a death rate of at least two people per 10,000 per day.
Two implications follow. First, the threshold is extraordinarily high — enormous suffering occurs in Phases 3 and 4 without any famine being declared. Second, meeting it requires data collection in exactly the places where collection is hardest, so declarations arrive late, after the deaths that qualify the area have already happened.
That the 2026 report recorded famine in two places simultaneously, for the first time in its history, is therefore a statement about a very extreme situation, not about a marginal one.
What compounds it beyond weather
El Niño does not act alone, and treating it as the sole cause misdirects the response.
Conflict is the largest driver of acute food insecurity globally. It displaces farmers, blocks aid and destroys markets, and no rainfall forecast changes that.
Debt. Many exposed countries are servicing heavy external debt, which limits the fiscal space to respond domestically and makes food imports more expensive when the currency weakens.
Input costs. Fertiliser and seed prices have been volatile, and a farmer who could not afford fertiliser has a smaller harvest before any drought arrives.
Aid budgets. Humanitarian appeals across the sector have been running well short of requirements, meaning the response capacity is already stretched before this shock lands.
This is why the World Bank framing — El Niño as a compounding factor rather than a standalone driver — deserves weight. The eventual death toll will be determined at least as much by these conditions as by rainfall.
Sources
- World Meteorological Organization, “WMO: Prepare for El Niño,” 2 June 2026 — wmo.int
- World Food Programme, “WFP ramps up preparedness and response plans as El Niño threatens to push tens of millions into acute hunger,” 5 August 2026 — wfp.org
- FAO, “Bracing for El Niño: FAO and WFP launch joint appeal to protect 8.8 million people from extreme weather events,” 18 June 2026 — fao.org
- FAO, “Acute food insecurity and malnutrition remain alarmingly high as crises deepen” (Global Report on Food Crises 2026), 24 April 2026 — fao.org
- World Economic Forum, “Strong El Niño could deepen hunger crisis,” 12 August 2026 — weforum.org
