The pending food shortage - like the drought - is one of those things we really should have seen coming.
The current bizarre weather conditions, which have led to the worst drought SA has seen in at least two decades, are thanks - apparently - to a global weather phenomenon called El Niño.
In simple English, El Niño is a pattern that sees the equatorial Pacific warmed because there is a weakening of the trade winds that usually can be relied upon to push sun-warmed waters to the west. This, says Washington Post, triggers a reaction from the atmosphere above.
The same paper explains its name traces back hundreds of years to the coast of Peru, where fishermen noticed the Pacific Ocean sometimes warmed in late December, around Christmas, and coincided with changes in fish populations. They named it El Niño after the infant Jesus Christ. Today, meteorologists call it the El Niño Southern Oscillation.
Notes Washington Post: “The last time there was an El Niño of similar magnitude to the current one, the record-setting event of 1997-1998, floods, fires, droughts and other calamities killed at least 30 000 people and caused $100 billion in damage.” Ouch.
“Another powerful El Niño, in 1918-19, sank India into a brutal drought and probably contributed to the global flu pandemic, according to a study by the Climate Programme Office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
El Niño reportedly tends to peak as summer comes to the Southern Hemisphere. And that’s smack bang in the middle of where we are today.
No-one needs to be told that temperatures have hit record highs - a look at any Facebook feed will provide several images of car thermometers in the 40s. Granted, it’s cooled a bit since then, but we have yet to see any rain of any meaningful consequence.
So, the drought stays in place. And yet, people continue to wash cars while farmers face bankruptcy and some suburbs go without water for days on end.
In Mpumalanga, feed stockists are already starting to run out of hay; the Sabie river is a doodle to walk over and - apparently - the west end of the Crocodile is dry.
So, yup, there’s going to be a food crisis. We’ll have to import, and given the extremely weak rand, this is going to prove problematic for all except the wealthy - and it’s going to hit the poor hardest.
Bloomberg has done their homework on this and apparently food inflation is set to accelerate to above 10 percent by the middle of next year, more than double the current pace. Corn prices have surged by more than 50 percent this year in South Africa.
Food carries the second-biggest weight in the inflation basket, with inflation at 4.7 percent now, and already the Reserve Bank is worried we’ll breach the target next year. Food is certain to push us well above that band - cue another rate hike and images of moths in wallets, and not money.
Bloomberg adds the last time food inflation was above 10 percent was between October 2011 and January 2012, when the worst drought in a quarter of a century ravaged crops in the US, the largest producer of corn.
The sad thing is, El Niño can be predicted. And should have been. I’m sure some lackey in the Weather Service was warning that it was approaching, and his memo is still sitting on his boss’s desk - under a cup of coffee.
Had someone, anyone, paid attention, we could have put measures into place to mitigate the worst of it. Of course, ensuring that infrastructure was kept up is more than a six-month plan, and should have been started many moons ago so valuable water doesn’t gush down our streets.
The problem, my English teacher always used to say, is that failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s what we’ve done - and this time it’s the poor who will bear the brunt of it, and the rest of us will also feel out pockets hit hard.
* Nicola Mawson is the online editor of Business Report. Follow her on Twitter @NicolaMawson or Business Report @busrep.
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