Last week on Global Citizen, we featured a fantastic photo project called Humans of Papua New Guinea, which was a chance to show the faces and stories of a country that remains mysterious to much of the world (check it out!). As I mentioned in that article, big parts of Papua New Guinea are still living very traditional lives, with dense forest, jagged mountains, and poverty meaning that connections to the outside world are taking time to develop. And that's ok, as long as the people are healthy and happy with their lives.
But one of the key downsides of lacking infrastructure (such as roads, airports, warehouses, large scale farming) and buying power (lots of PNG locals build their own houses and grow their own food, so money isn't at the centre of quite as many things) is that when something goes wrong, there aren't as many ways to fix it.
Drought troubles
"El Niño" is a term that turns up in the news from time to time. Especially in Spanish language news, because it means "the boy". But in English language news, it refers to a global weather pattern first noted by Peruvian farmers 400 years ago. They saw that in some years, at around Christmas, the waters of the Pacific Ocean became unusually warm and the fish disappeared from their region. The warm water also coincides with warm air, and major variations to normal rainfall.
The last major El Niño event was in 1997-98, when $35 billion of damage/loss occurred, and over 20,000 people died. The weather pattern causes drought across large parts of the world, cyclones in others, and for warm weather countries who are reliant on the food that they grow, El Niño years are very bad years indeed.
The bad news is that the next round of El Niño is suspected to be building up right now. Images from NASA suggest that it could be even worse than the 1997-98 bout, and this has caused major worry in nations that face onto the Pacific Ocean.
Papua New Guinea, and others
The Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea has started talking to the media about the weather threat, suggesting that his country might fall under the grip of its worst drought in 20 years. For a country where families and villages grow the food that they eat, it's very hard to find the money and infrastructure to import food supplies from other parts of the world. Other important parts of the PNG economy such as coffee growing (1% of the world's coffee comes from PNG) and tea growing are also vulnerable to El Niño.
Elsewhere, problems are already being felt. Thailand has started rationing its water supplies, Peru has declared a state of emergency after mudslides, and the movement of ships through the Panama Canal has been reduced because there's simply not enough water in the canal. And this is really just the build-up phase... if a major El Niño season occurs, it'll get a lot worse than this.
Food security
It's clear that food security is always an important thing. It enables communities and countries to plan ahead, it provides the consistent conditions for kids to go to school, businesses to run, and societies to function. Over the next 12 months the food security of communities in El Niño affected areas will be severely tested, as this natural weather phenomenon plays out. El Niño doesn't care about national borders, and an international response is going to be needed to ensure that hardship is minimised.
The size of the response needed will depend on how severe the weather conditions get, but there's every chance that it'll need to include things like disaster rescue, transportation of emergency food supplies, and technical help to keep farms productive and get them back to full capacity afterwards. If entire livelihoods and communities collapse due to a drought, it requires a much bigger aid and development effort to get them back on their feet, so it's common sense (as well as the right thing morally) to help early, and help smart.