A new Sunday series tracking what this El Niño is actually doing to rainfall, harvests, prices and people, and what is being blamed on it that has other causes. This first edition is summative and covers all eight monitored regions. Later editions will run highlights. The short version: three regions were more than 20 percent below their June baselines, the largest food-security numbers in the region are driven by conflict rather than weather, and the drought signal everyone is worried about is a forecast for a season that has not started.
This is the first edition of a weekly round-up. The purpose is narrow: separate what has been observed from what has been projected, and keep El Niño from absorbing credit for outcomes it did not cause.
One piece of housekeeping. Until this morning the rainfall panel on this site was broken, and we published the diagnosis separately. The numbers below come from the rebuilt feed, which reports monthly totals against a multi-year baseline for the same calendar month.
Monthly accumulated rainfall against the mean of the same calendar month in prior years. The years column matters: it is the depth of evidence behind each comparison, and we publish it so you can discount the thin ones.
| Region | June 2026 | June average | Anomaly | Years | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| East Africa (Horn) | 36 mm | 52.9 mm | −32% | 7 | MODERATE DEFICIT |
| Peru & Ecuador coast | 98 mm | 137.9 mm | −29% | 10 | MODERATE DEFICIT |
| Indonesia & SE Asia | 189 mm | 240.2 mm | −21% | 10 | NEAR NORMAL |
| South Asia / India | 98 mm | 116.4 mm | −15% | 10 | NEAR NORMAL |
| Northern China | 81 mm | 92.9 mm | −13% | 10 | NEAR NORMAL |
| Northeast Brazil | 34 mm | 36.9 mm | −8% | 10 | NEAR NORMAL |
| Eastern Australia | 32 mm | 27.3 mm | +18% | 10 | NEAR NORMAL |
| Southern Africa | 9 mm | 6.9 mm | +31% | 10 | ABOVE NORMAL |
Source: CHIRPS via ClimateSERV, retrieved 9 August 2026. Two caveats that apply to every row. This feed runs roughly 40 days behind, so June is the most recent complete month available in August. And a ten-year baseline is shorter than the conventional 30-year climate normal, so treat these as useful comparisons rather than formal climatological anomalies.
Southern Africa is +31 percent and that means almost nothing. June sits in the middle of its dry season, so the baseline is 6.9 mm and the whole comparison is between two small numbers. Across much of southern Africa, the main 2026/27 rainy season begins around October. Anyone reading a wet June there as reassurance is reading the wrong month. The region contains more than one rainfall regime, so not every location follows that calendar.
The same caution applies in reverse to Peru. A 29 percent deficit on a coast whose El Niño signature is flooding looks arresting, but coastal rainfall there is strongly seasonal and a single dry month carries little information about the coming warm season.
Indonesia and Southeast Asia is the one that most deserves attention. At 21 percent below a ten-year June average, in a region where El Niño's dry signal is well established and where BMKG has already been acting ahead of the peak, it is the clearest observed alignment between the index and the ground in this table.
FEWS NET's Southern Africa Food Security Outlook covers June 2026 to January 2027. Its El Niño finding is a forecast, and the tense matters:
On the IPC scale, Phase 3 is Crisis. Phase 5 is called Catastrophe at the household level and Famine at the area level. No Phase 5 classification appears in this outlook. We will use the phase numbers rather than looser words, and we will not use the word famine unless the IPC declares one.
An index-driven risk score cannot represent any of that, which is roughly the point of this series.
Prices are observations, and they can move before assistance figures do. FEWS NET reports Malawi maize significantly above average and expected to rise further through at least January. Mozambique shows atypically high maize and rice prices, driven by reduced local availability and rising transport costs. Angola shows elevated prices with weakening livestock-to-maize terms of trade, which is the mechanism that turns a pasture problem into a food-access problem for herding households.
Zimbabwe and Zambia, by contrast, report broadly stable or declining staple prices after the 2026 harvest.
This is where a rainfall-led reading goes wrong, and it is the largest single number in the constructed seven-country total.
IAMElNino.com analysis. Seven Southern African countries in the FEWS NET outlook carry a published population-in-need range. Summing the endpoints gives roughly 23.1 to 26.5 million people. That is a crude construction, since FEWS NET publishes per-country ranges and no regional total, so treat it as an order of magnitude. DR Congo alone accounts for 17 to 18 million people, approximately 68 to 74 percent of this constructed seven-country range. It is about 74 percent when the lower endpoints are compared and about 68 percent when the upper endpoints are compared. FEWS NET names conflict, mass displacement and an Ebola outbreak as the drivers there, not rainfall. Strip DR Congo out and the remaining six countries total roughly 6.1 to 8.5 million.
Conflict runs through the rest too. Northern Mozambique's Crisis outcomes are attributed to non-state armed group activity in Cabo Delgado and Nampula, displacement and disrupted markets, with the 2025/26 agricultural season affected.
The holistic version of this story has to include the cost of moving grain, not just the cost of growing it.
FEWS NET's Zimbabwe assessment is explicit that fuel and transport costs remain above average following the escalation in the Middle East conflict in February, and that this is reducing disposable income and access to basic goods, despite recent fuel price reductions. In Mozambique, rising transport costs are named alongside reduced local availability as a driver of high maize and rice prices. In eastern DR Congo, the Ebola outbreak has itself suppressed cross-border trade and the incomes that depend on it.
None of that is El Niño. All of it lands on the same household budget. A drought that arrives on top of elevated freight costs produces a worse outcome than the same drought would in a cheap-fuel year, which is why we have covered the diesel side and canal draft restrictions as part of the same picture rather than as separate stories.
CPC's 9 July discussion has El Niño continuing and strengthening, with a 97 percent chance it persists through early spring 2027 and an 81 percent chance of a very strong event during October to December. Those probabilities are verified against RONI, not the more commonly quoted ONI. For May to July 2026, CPC reported ONI at +1.4°C and RONI at +1.0°C.
That distinction matters here because the impact literature and many familiar historical analogues are commonly organised around ONI, while CPC's official probabilities now use RONI. Quoting a RONI-verified probability against an ONI-based threshold is a comparison error, and it is a common one.
Three of eight monitored regions were more than 20 percent below their June average, and Indonesia and Southeast Asia is the one where the observed dryness lines up best with the expected El Niño signal. Southern Africa was wetter than its June baseline, but the +31 percent comes from 9 mm against 6.9 mm during the dry season and says little about the coming agricultural season. The largest food-security number in the region is mostly DR Congo, whose emergency is primarily conflict- and displacement-driven, with Ebola compounding trade and livelihood disruptions. The drought that is genuinely expected in Southern Africa is expected from October, and October has not happened.
Next edition runs highlights rather than the full table, and will lead with whatever actually moved.