Proactive and urgent Regional Strategy needed to address the threat of El Niño

By Muhammad Ibrahim
Director General, IICA

The extreme variant of the El Niño phenomenon predicted by international weather forecasts, combined with the global fertilizer crisis, poses a dual threat to rural economies, social stability, and agricultural production in Latin America and the Caribbean-a region critical to global food security.

Even separately, both factors pose enormous challenges for regional agriculture. Combined, they could become a perfect storm for millions of producers, affecting food security in quite a few nations.

Forecasts indicate a high probability of El Niño developing this year, with potentially uneven effects: heavy rains and flooding in some regions; prolonged droughts and water stress in others. The common concern is the uncertainty regarding the phenomenon’s potentially greater intensity.

In the Southern Cone, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, some regions could benefit from increased rainfall and a recovery in crop yields. In Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America, the outlook is less favourable.

There, the risk of lower yields and crop losses, decreased livestock productivity, disruptions in agricultural markets, and sharp increases in food prices is significant, which can lead to a deterioration in food security and force producers and consumers to face costs running into the millions. These are not potential dangers; recent history bears them out.

These impacts, particularly in rural areas, are often followed by debt, migration, and nutritional decline.

For agricultural producers, especially small and medium-sized ones, climate uncertainty makes it difficult to decide what to plant, how much to invest, or what level of fertilization to apply. And when fertilizers become more expensive or scarce, many choose to reduce application rates, decrease the area planted, or switch to less demanding crops, with immediate and negative effects on yields and production.

Unlike in the past, it is now possible to anticipate the occurrence, impacts, and consequences of climate phenomena such as El Niño—or its counterpart, La Niña.

Today, it is unjustifiable to act only on the consequences and limit ourselves to reacting when drought is advanced, floods occur, crops are lost, or prices rise. We must act sooner to minimize negative impacts.

For all these reasons, the time has come to move toward a proactive regional strategy. It is imperative to promote a broad hemispheric dialogue on agri-food resilience that brings together governments, international organizations, producers, the financial sector, academia, and the private sector around a common agenda: developing anticipation capabilities to protect both agricultural production and life in rural areas.

In this context, international technical cooperation, with its capacity for political and technical coordination and its relationships with governments, producers, companies, and international financial institutions, is uniquely positioned to promote regional cooperation agreements and proactive responses, as well as, if necessary, to coordinate aid and solidarity efforts to address emergencies.

Among the public-private collaboration mechanisms that can be promoted are regional platforms for climate and agricultural coordination; agreements with fertilizer and logistics companies to ensure supply in vulnerable areas; innovative financial instruments in partnership with public and private banks; the expansion of climate insurance; and joint technological adaptation programmes for small and medium-sized producers.

Private sector participation is crucial for these strategies to be viable and scalable, given that chemical companies, agribusiness, banks, technology firms, and export chains play a fundamental role in the shared development of agricultural resilience.

Strengthening early warning systems and transforming climate information into concrete decision-making tools must become a regional priority. Latin America and the Caribbean produce meteorological and agricultural data of immense value, but often that information does not reach producers in a timely manner.

The widespread adoption of drought-resistant seeds and tools for efficient water management, combined with an agronomic management strategy that incorporates advanced technologies (such as GPS, drones, and sensors), should be among the other objectives of this coordination.

The dual challenge posed by El Niño and the fertilizer crisis can also become an opportunity: that of building a new agri-food governance system based on regional cooperation, innovation, and foresight.

Latin America and the Caribbean produce food for billions of people, both within and beyond their borders. Protecting this productive capacity is not merely an economic challenge. It is a strategic issue for development, rural stability, and global food security.