El Niño Sparks Food Crisis in East Africa as Response Infrastructure Stalls

East Africa is facing a severe food crisis due to El Niño, which is expected to persist into 2027. The region's grain prices are climbing, with Kenya's North Rift experiencing widespread crop failure and Uganda running emergency food deliveries into Karamoja after more than a million acres of crops were lost.

Forecasters predict an 81% chance of a very strong El Niño forming between October and December, which is not surprising given that the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) had flagged maize prices as 20% above average months before the crisis reached headlines.

The World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation have been prepositioning stocks and cash transfers in vulnerable countries for months, but the real question is whether East Africa's response infrastructure can keep pace with its warning systems. The sector needs to move beyond mere awareness of a risk and towards the capacity to act on it at scale.

Genuine readiness would require strategic grain reserves that release on a forecast trigger rather than after shortages are already visible in markets, as well as regional trade corridors kept open during shocks. Public investment in irrigation and water storage should be treated as core infrastructure spending, not just a separate research exercise.