The storm beneath the Pacific

Botswana is confronting twin challenges of a possible drought; and a virus that is refusing to go away. It is threatening the livstock; and the beef industry. The cattle herd was 2.1 million not long ago – the national herd that underpins Botswana’s rural economy, its export earnings, its sense of self. Drought could kill thousands. And now a virus is moving through the crowds at the water points, leaping from one weakened animal to the next in some parts of the country.

On Jan. 29, veterinary authorities confirmed what farmers had feared: Foot and Mouth Disease, serotype SAT1, had surfaced in Jakalas village, in the North-East District. Within a week, the United Kingdom had shut its borders to fresh Botswana beef. By Feb. 23, the European Union followed, enacting Commission Implementing Regulation 2026/451, suspending imports from the Maitengwe zone. The Botswana Meat Commission – the state-owned enterprise that has channeled the country’s beef to European tables since 1965 – was forced to refund P123 million to buyers whose contracts had been voided overnight. Projected revenue losses for 2026 now exceed P200 million.

But the true scale of what is coming has less to do with a virus than with an immense, slow-moving rearrangement of the world’s weather – one that is gathering force 10,000 miles east of Botswana, beneath the equatorial Pacific, and that scientists say could produce the most powerful El Niño ever recorded.

In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed that El Niño conditions were taking hold in the Pacific and projected a 63 percent chance that sea surface temperatures would exceed 2 degrees Celsius above normal by late this year; the threshold scientists informally label a “Super El Niño.” Some modeling ensembles go further: 96 percent of dynamical model runs surveyed by the World Meteorological Organization suggest the 2026–27 event could surpass the 2015–16 record of 2.75 degrees Celsius, itself the strongest El Niño in the modern instrumental era.

The term “Super El Niño” is not a formal NOAA category. It is a shorthand that has gained wide currency for events that far exceed the 2-degree anomaly; the kind that rearranges rainfall across continents, withers harvests, floods cities, and pushes food prices to levels that strain the politics of nations. Only three such events have been reliably recorded: 1982–83, 1997–98, and 2015–16. The 1997–98 event reached an E-index value of 3.84; it is the benchmark against which the current one is being measured.

And the current one is arriving on top of something the earlier events never faced: record-high baseline ocean temperatures, driven by human-caused climate change. Global ocean temperatures were at their highest recorded levels going into 2026. A 2-degree Pacific anomaly today rides a warmer thermal baseline than a 2-degree anomaly in 1997. The same ENSO classification now produces more extreme impacts than it would have decades ago. The physics are the same. The stage is hotter.

The mechanism behind El Niño is by now well understood, if no less alarming for it. Trade winds that normally push warm surface water westward across the Pacific weaken or reverse. A vast pool of anomalously warm water spreads eastward across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. The shift rearranges the Walker circulation – the equatorial atmospheric convection cell that governs where rain falls across the tropics – and the consequences cascade outward: drought in southern Africa and northern South America, flooding in southern Brazil and Argentina, a weakened monsoon in India, warmer and wetter conditions in eastern Africa.

The effects have already begun. In India, the monsoon has arrived late and delivered a fraction of its normal rainfall; some regions have received just 25 percent of the usual precipitation, with parts of central India at 50 percent, threatening wheat, rice, and sugarcane supplies. In Southeast Asia, drought conditions are raising concerns about palm oil, a ubiquitous ingredient in processed food worldwide.

But it is the economic forecast that has rattled central banks and drawn the attention of the world’s largest financial institutions.

Goldman Sachs projects that the strength of this El Niño could cause a 15.8 percent surge in global food commodity prices, with the full effect not materializing until the second half of 2028; because the weather must first hit the harvests, and the harvest shortfalls must then percolate through processing, shipping, and retail. The European Central Bank estimated three years ago that a strong El Niño could drive up global food commodity prices by up to 9 percent, with soybeans, corn, and rice seeing the biggest spikes. Risilience, a climate-risk analytics firm, calculates that an extreme El Niño scenario could deliver a 14.3 percent hit to global agricultural production – equivalent to $342 billion in lost output – with core commodity prices rising 10 to 50 percent, and the most exposed crops, including rice, palm oil, sugar, and coffee, potentially doubling in price or more.

“El Niño does not affect agriculture uniformly,” analysts at UBS wrote. “It reshapes global rainfall and temperature patterns, creating regional winners and losers.” Some regions could stand to benefit from warmer, wetter conditions. But the losers, as is almost always the case with climate shocks, are the countries least equipped to absorb the losses.

In July, the Peterson Institute for International Economics published an analysis that quantified the macroeconomic damage in terms sharp enough to make policymakers flinch. Anchored in a 2023 study by climate scientists Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin, published in Science, the PIIE analysis applied El Niño GDP-loss elasticities; essentially, how much a given event reduces growth, country by country, based on the strength of each nation’s climate “teleconnection” to the Pacific; to the anticipated magnitude of the 2026 event.

But the global average conceals a violent asymmetry. The most strongly teleconnected countries; those whose local temperature and rainfall respond most powerfully to Pacific warming; are disproportionately lower- and middle-income nations in the tropics: Ecuador, Peru, Indonesia, Malaysia, Suriname, Panama, Nicaragua, Togo, Zambia, and Costa Rica comprise the top 10.

The channels are multiple and mutually reinforcing, as Cullen Hendrix, the PIIE senior fellow who authored the analysis, explained. Failed harvests reduce farm incomes and drive up food import bills, diverting foreign exchange from productive investment. Flooding and landslides damage infrastructure, and rebuilding crowds out spending on the public investments that compound into long-run growth. Elevated disease burden reduces labor productivity. And because many of the most teleconnected countries are already carrying heavy debt loads from the COVID-19 pandemic, they have limited fiscal space to mount countercyclical responses.

“The result is not a single dramatic blow but an accumulation of smaller ones likely to erode the investment base driving future growth,” Hendrix wrote. “Death by a thousand cuts that are only partially visible in real time, but cumulatively significant.”

In southern Africa, the pattern is among the most consistent and damaging of any El Niño teleconnection. Warm Pacific anomalies shift the Walker circulation, which displaces the Intertropical Convergence Zone and weakens the rain-bearing systems that normally reach the region during the austral summer, from December through February. The result is a stark north-south divide: southern Africa dries out, while eastern Africa floods.

The most recent El Niño, in 2023–24, was classified as strong but not super. Even so, its effects across the subcontinent were devastating. Six countries – Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe – declared states of emergency or disaster linked to severe drought. By late 2024, more than 13.6 million people across the region were experiencing crisis-level food insecurity. In Malawi, maize prices roughly doubled during the 2015–16 El Niño. In South Africa, maize spot prices surged comparably. Research shows El Niño can trigger 2 to 20 percent maize price increases across southern Africa, depending on the event’s intensity.

A Super El Niño amplifies each of these channels, and the effect is not merely linear. At higher sea surface temperature anomalies, the Walker circulation displacement is larger, the ITCZ shift more pronounced, and the probability of concurrent extremes; heat and drought striking at once; increases non-linearly. A Super El Niño does not just make southern Africa drier. It makes it drier and hotter simultaneously, compounding stress on rain-fed agriculture and on the livestock that graze the rangeland.

Botswana sits at the southern edge of this teleconnection, exposed and structurally fragile. Its agricultural sector contributes roughly 2 to 3 percent of GDP, a figure that understates its significance by an order of magnitude. Cattle farming accounts for approximately 80 percent of agricultural GDP. The national herd, estimated at 2.1 million head, underpins rural livelihoods, food security, and export earnings. The Botswana Meat Commission holds the sole license to export beef to the European Union under a duty-free, quota-free agreement; producers selling through the BMC to the EU receive roughly 60 percent more than they would selling into South African markets. Beef is the country’s primary agricultural export.

But the system is fragile in ways that the drought has made brutally visible. Botswana declared the 2023–24 season an “extreme agricultural drought year” – the country’s third consecutive. Crop production met only 6 percent of national cereal demand. The country already imports the vast majority of its food; domestic production covers a fraction of consumption even in good years. More than 16,000 livestock deaths were attributed directly to drought conditions: dehydration, heat stress, the absence of adequate pasture and water. The government implemented emergency relief – water tankering, livestock feed subsidies – but the scale of need outpaced the response.

A fourth consecutive drought year is now likely. If the 2026–27 El Niño follows its projected Super trajectory, the October-to-March dry season will coincide with the peak of ENSO-driven teleconnection effects. Surface water in dams, rivers, and boreholes; already strained by three years of deficit; will decline further. The carrying capacity of rangeland will shrink, forcing herders into overstocking in remaining viable areas, which accelerates land degradation. Cattle in communal areas, with limited access to supplemental feed, will face elevated mortality. And the global and regional maize price increases driven by El Niño will transmit directly into Botswana’s consumer prices, raising the cost of the food the country must import to survive.

And then there is the virus.

Foot and Mouth Disease is among the most contagious pathogens known to veterinary science. It affects cloven-hoofed animals – cattle, sheep, goats, pigs; causing painful vesicles on the tongue, lips, feet, and teats. In adult cattle, it produces a 13.2 percent weight loss and a 23.1 percent reduction in milk production, according to veterinary research conducted in Botswana. While adult mortality from FMD is generally low, the disease can kill up to 20 percent of calves through myocarditis. Even after recovery, cattle may remain carriers, and their long-term growth and reproductive performance can be permanently impaired. Globally, FMD costs the livestock sector an estimated $5 billion annually.

The Jan. 29 confirmation in Jakalas village set off an immediate trade cascade. The World Organisation for Animal Health suspended the FMD-free status of Zone 6b. Suspected cases were detected in Zone 3c, the Maitengwe region, and confirmed by Feb. 13. The UK restricted fresh bovine meat imports on Feb. 4. The EU followed with Regulation 2026/451 on Feb. 23. No consignments of fresh beef slaughtered and certified after Jan. 29 from the affected zones would be accepted.

The outbreak did not stay contained. In April, a new FMD detection surfaced in Zone 11; roughly 530 kilometers from the original outbreak zones; classified as a separate event. Zone 11 had previously held WOAH FMD-free status, a designation critical to Botswana’s compartmentalization strategy, which depends on geographic isolation of disease events to maintain export eligibility in unaffected zones. By June, fresh cases had been identified at Phihetswane, and the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture confirmed further spread. Veterinary checkpoints were erected, movement controls tightened, and 140 smuggled cattle found crossing disease control boundaries were destroyed.

By May 17, 16,729 of an expected 20,485 cattle had been vaccinated in Zone 11, representing 82 percent cumulative coverage; impressive, but short of the 95 percent threshold epidemiologists consider necessary to break transmission chains. Three rounds of vaccination had been completed in zones 6b North and 3c, with the second round ongoing in 6b South. In July, the Ministry announced a partial easing of movement restrictions in some zones following successful control measures. But the situation remained active, and neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa were contending with their own FMD outbreaks, creating a cross-border reservoir of infection that no single country can seal off.

What makes Botswana’s situation uniquely dangerous is not that drought and FMD are happening at the same time. It is that they interact; amplifying each other in ways that compound the damage beyond the simple sum of two crises.

Drought weakens cattle. Animals facing water scarcity and inadequate forage experience immunosuppression, leaving them more susceptible to viral infection. Drought also forces cattle from multiple herds to congregate at the remaining boreholes and dams, creating the dense aggregations in which FMD spreads most efficiently – through direct contact, aerosol transmission, and contaminated surfaces. And drought drives herders to move their animals across zones in search of pasture and water, increasing the probability of crossing disease control boundaries. The 140 smuggled cattle destroyed in early 2026 were not simply lawbreakers; they were evidence of a structural pressure that movement controls alone cannot contain.

Then the economic feedback loop closes. Drought reduces pasture; cattle lose condition; FMD causes greater weight loss and mortality in already weakened animals; carcass value falls; the BMC’s throughput drops; export revenue collapses. The FMD export bans prevent Botswana from selling even the cattle that survive the drought. The EU price premium – roughly 60 percent above the South African market – evaporates at precisely the moment the country needs it most. Government fiscal space is consumed by parallel emergencies: drought relief on one hand, FMD vaccination and surveillance on the other, drawing on the same veterinary infrastructure and the same budget. And regional food inflation; driven by El Niño’s impact on South African maize production; raises the cost of supplemental livestock feed at the exact moment herders need it most.

The scenario unfolds along a spectrum. If drought proves moderate and FMD is contained to zones 6b and 3c, the damage is severe but manageable: the projected P200 million export loss, targeted vaccination campaigns, and emergency relief. If a Super El Niño delivers a fourth consecutive drought year with widespread pasture failure, and FMD spreads to additional zones as the Zone 11 event already suggests, export losses could reach P300 to P500 million, cattle mortality could escalate sharply, and rural livelihoods would face a crisis without recent precedent. In the worst case; a Super El Niño comparable to 1997–98, combined with an uncontained multi-zone FMD outbreak with regional spread; the cumulative loss could exceed P1 billion, the export market could collapse entirely, and a national livestock emergency could require years of recovery.

There are things that can be done. The question is whether they will be done in time.

In the immediate term, Botswana needs to complete FMD vaccination coverage – the 82 percent achieved in Zone 11 by May must reach 95 percent across all affected and at-risk zones. Movement enforcement needs reinforcement; the destruction of smuggled cattle indicates that controls are being breached under economic pressure, and penalties must be credible enough to outweigh the desperation driving the breaches. Emergency drought relief – water tankering, supplemental feed distribution, livestock shelters; should be staged before the October-to-March dry season peaks, rather than mobilized after the losses have already accumulated, as was the pattern in 2023–24.

In the medium term, the country’s structural vulnerabilities demand structural answers. Botswana’s dependence on a single export market creates a catastrophic single point of failure; accelerating access to alternative markets; the Middle East, Asia, and processed beef products that face fewer FMD-related restrictions; could reduce the damage from the next outbreak. Investment in water infrastructure – borehole capacity, small dams, rainwater harvesting systems in rangeland areas; would reduce the forced concentration of cattle at limited water points, directly reducing FMD transmission risk during drought. A shift from maize monoculture toward drought-resilient crops – cassava, sorghum, millet – could buffer food security against El Niño-driven rainfall deficits; research consistently shows these crops are more resilient to southern African drought patterns.

And the BMC bottleneck matters. The commission’s monopoly on EU exports creates a structural choke point. Liberalizing beef exports, as the government has proposed, would allow more producers to access alternative markets, distributing the risk that is currently concentrated in a single channel.

But Botswana’s crisis cannot be solved within Botswana’s borders – and the same is true for the broader catastrophe that a Super El Niño promises to deliver across the tropics.

The single highest-return intervention available, according to PIIE’s Hendrix, is for multilateral development banks; the World Bank, regional development banks, and the International Monetary Fund – to pre-position concessional credit facilities for high-teleconnection lower- and middle-income countries before the peak of the event, not after. The general pattern with climate-related shocks has been that affected countries face widening sovereign spreads precisely when they most need to borrow to maintain investment and social spending. Getting ahead of that dynamic; approving facilities now that can be drawn on quickly; would bend the curve on the cumulative losses. The IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facility exists for this purpose, but its eligibility requirements and capitalization make it a niche instrument rather than a rapid-response one. “This is a moment to waive or streamline those requirements,” Hendrix wrote.

The World Food Programme needs urgent recapitalization. U.S. contributions were cut by 54 percent in 2025, and the combination of El Niño-driven harvest failures with the ongoing disruption to fertilizer supplies from the Strait of Hormuz closure creates a foreseeable and partially preventable food price crisis in late 2026 and early 2027. Pre-positioning food reserves and humanitarian aid before the peak of the event, rather than after the famines have begun, is the difference between a crisis managed and a catastrophe endured.

More than a century ago, an El Niño that would likely have been the most severe on record prompted catastrophic droughts across China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt, and India. Under colonial rule, the resulting famines killed millions – more than 6 million people in India alone between 1876 and 1878. The event illustrates the worst-case trajectory: an extreme ENSO perturbation, amplified by political and economic structures that prevented the most vulnerable from adapting, producing mass mortality that was not a natural disaster so much as a political choice.

The forecast today is known. The science is clear. The economic models have been published and peer-reviewed. NOAA has announced the El Niño; Goldman Sachs has quantified the food price shock; PIIE has measured the GDP losses; the EU has published its regulation number. What remains is whether policymakers – in Gaborone, in Addis Ababa, in Washington, in Brussels – will act on what they can see coming, or wait passively for the losses to compound.

The post The storm beneath the Pacific appeared first on Weekend Post.