By Maria Gallucci - In Australia last month, the Sydney-Morning Herald reports, the nationwide rainfall was 32 percent below the June average and in India, dry conditions are also delaying the sowing of rice, corn, soybeans and cotton.
“The rainfall pattern has gotten distorted this year, and it will have some impact on agricultural productivity,” Dharmakirti Joshi, chief economist at Crisil Ltd., S&P’s local unit, told Bloomberg News from Mumbai.
Scientists credit some of these and other weather anomolies to the shifting winds and roiling waters in the Pacific Ocean that look to be stirring up an El Niño phenomenon in the coming months, and the two countries are among those already feeling its earliest impacts.
An especially balmy Australia smashed its temperature record for the 12-month period ending in June, with temperatures rising to a full 1.08 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said.
India received just 92.4 millimeters (3.6 inches) of rain last month, about half as much as the average between 1951 and 2000, the India Meteorological Department said. And the monsoon, which brings critical rainfall to the country’s crops, has made no progress over India’s western and central regions in the last three weeks, Bloomberg reported.
During an El Niño event, warm waters that normally pool in the western Pacific shift toward the east, aided by westerly wind bursts that accelerate the change. Since warm ocean temperatures help create rain clouds, countries in the Americas typically experience heavy rainfalls and severe flooding from El Niños.
The western Pacific, by contrast, is more prone to drought and warmer weather on the ground.
The World Meteorological Organization last week put the odds of a moderate-strength El Niño forming before August at 60 percent, and at 75 to 80 percent between October and December. Some climatologists have said that an early, weak El Niño is already here, though no government agency has official declared its arrival.
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Indonesia could also take a big hit during a moderate El Niño event. The country is now entering the dry season, and a drought layered on top of that would make its forests especially brittle—good news for the people who burn trees to clear the way for palm oil plantations. During an El Niño, the large-scale forest clearance would exacerbate the threat of forest fires, Jakarta Post noted this week.
The news was a bit brighter on the opposite side of the Pacific. In Brazil and Chile, heavier rainfalls caused by El Niño are expected to boost agricultural output and help refill the reservoirs that feed hydroelectric plants, which have reached record lows because of drought or low rainfall in recent years, according to a report by Moody’s Investor Service released on Tuesday.
Peru, on the other hand, will likely be harder hit. Warm waters off the Andean coast are already keeping away schools of anchovies, which are used to make fishmeal for animal feed and fish oil supplements. Peru’s National Fisheries Society requested an “urgent action” from the government in June to allow for fishing farther off the coast. Flooding and landslides could also severely damage the country’s infrastructure.
Still, Peru has the necessary assets to pay for such damages, Moody’s said. Government and banks throughout South America are similarly in good enough financial shape to deal with costs related to flooding, emergency aid relief and rebuilding damaged infrastructure. That marks a sharp departure from the 1997-98 El Niño, the strongest in recent history, which wreaked widespread havoc in the Americas and dealt a stiff blow to the continent’s weak economies.