Hundreds of farmers were gathered under the village’s biggest wild mango tree, summoned by the chief, when the government workers arrived with a dire warning. Drought was soon likely to hit. The farmers had better prepare.
The cause, they said, is this year’s extraordinarily powerful El Niño, a global weather phenomenon born in the Pacific Ocean, half a world away from their village of Namasoko, Malawi, in southern Africa.
If the farmers bought special drought-resistant seeds, they might be able to avoid hunger and financial despair. But a single bag costs $43. And most farmers make less than $3 per day.
“What are we to do?” asked Patrick Hareke, 46, one of the farmers.
It’s a question being asked across the developing world.
Preparing for El Niño is daunting even in good times. The natural phenomenon scrambles global weather in ways that are both predictable and economically devastating. It typically causes droughts in Latin America and southern Africa that hit one group above all: poor farmers who are at the mercy of the skies.
This year, preparation is even tougher. The United States’ war in Iran is making fertilizer and fuel much costlier. Deep cuts in international aid by the United States and other countries means that funding to the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa has cratered to the lowest level since the early 2000s.
In June the United Nations launched an El Niño plan to help 22 countries — including Malawi — considered particularly vulnerable. But fund-raising shortfalls have prevented work in Malawi and six other nations from starting. And planting season begins now.
Malawi’s government has designed its own El Niño plan with dozens of objectives. That’s why government officials were in the village of Namasoko a few weeks ago — spreading the word about El Niño and telling people to buy the faster-growing corn seeds.
But only about a third of Malawi’s plan is funded. And no money has so far been dedicated to helping farmers buy the seeds they need, one of the plan’s goals.
“If the budget for this is zero” as farmers begin to plant, said Jacob Nyirongo, the chief executive officer of the Farmers Union of Malawi, “you already know it won’t be enough to make a dent.”
Namasoko is just one among hundreds of Malawian villages dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Several weeks after the meeting under the mango tree, the village chief, Gibson Bonongwe, said he didn’t know one person among Namasoko’s population of 2,860 who had been able to purchase the hybrid seeds. Same with the fertilizer, which costs $115 for a 15-kilogram bag. “This is a price they cannot afford,” he said.
Not for lack of trying. One farmer there, Felix James Mankhanamba, 35, described how he’s been biking to Mozambique — across an international border — to buy potatoes that he can sell back in town for about an $8 profit. The ride takes 16 hours round-trip.
Farmers without the special hybrid seeds will most likely plant seeds recycled from their previous harvests. That’s their usual practice. But those seeds don’t have the same predictability or yields.
It could work. But in previous El Niño years, like 2015-16 and 2023-24, it didn’t.
Those events led to two of Malawi’s worst staple-grain harvests over the past 20 years. In both instances, hunger levels soared.
And this year’s El Niño is emerging as the strongest on record, which could further intensify extreme heat waves, floods and droughts. The International Food Policy Research Institute projects that Malawi could see an extra 4.6 million people, or 20 percent of the population, become undernourished.
That helps explain why, one recent afternoon, a van mounted with loudspeakers arrived in Namasoko, its latest stop on a rural seed-selling barnstorming tour. A team in the van were hawking drought resistant seeds from the German-owned brand Dekalb.
“The climate has changed,” one person said into the microphone, as people walked along the main drag. “The best seeds are products of Dekalb.”
At first, the reaction was slow. So one of the Dekalb promoters grabbed a passerby, Luka Kamtiki, and staged a little variety show. He asked Mr. Kamtiki, 36, to do some tongue-twisters as a crowd of a dozen grew. Then the promoter reached his hand into the van.
“We have T-shirts, key holders, seed samples,” he said. “Which would you prefer?”
Mr. Kamtiki smiled. He wore a tattered white shirt, the pocket almost falling off. Later he explained that his last corn harvest had brought in $57 and that he was managing to feed his family of three children only because he spent 12 hours a day riding a bicycle-taxi. But he had lots of land, and to weather a drought, he’d ideally want 30 kilograms of the hybrid seeds.
So Kamtiki requested the seed samples. He walked away with plastic bags holding 200 grams — less than 1 percent of what he needed.
Preparing for an El Niño requires not just studying where the rain might stop, but knowing which places have already lost their ability to cope. On the United Nations’ map of El Niño risk, much of Malawi is colored a burning red.
It is one of the 10 poorest countries in the world. The dearth of resources shows up even in an elementary school in Namasoko, where 200 students sit on the floor in front of one teacher. And Malawi has been pummeled by disasters as global temperatures warm.
Cyclone Idai in 2019 damaged 300,000 homes and destroyed half the maize fields in the country’s southern tip. Cyclone Freddy followed four years later, dumping a year’s worth of rain in four days and killing 679 people. Then in 2024, an El Niño-fueled drought prompted the government to declare a state of emergency across much of the country.
Each of these disasters left impossible bills for recovery and reconstruction — $390 million, $680 million, $446 million — in a country that spends half of its revenue on debt payments. Malawi now lacks the funds to stock gasoline stations with fuel.
“A constant erosion,” Malawi’s government put it in one report.
In trying to warn about this year’s El Niño, Malawi is taking precisely the steps that an agriculture-dependent nation should, experts say. Preparation is crucial at a time of reduced international aid, because it can limit the spiraling costs after a disaster has struck, the U.N. has said.
“The government has taken this seriously,” said Lucy Bandazi, a spokeswoman for Malawi’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs.
But awareness doesn’t do much if people don’t have the means to act.
Justin Saidi, Malawi’s chief secretary, said in an interview that the government has been appealing to development banks, as well as governments like Britain and Australia, and “we are hopeful” the El Niño plan can be fully implemented. The plan calls for constructing livestock watering points, stockpiling food in vulnerable areas and distributing pesticides to control outbreaks that are more likely during drought.
Malawi also has an annual program, in place regardless of climate conditions, that aims to subsidize fertilizer and seeds for roughly 1 million farmers. But in recent years, the government program has faced delays in importing some of the fertilizer, meaning it comes too late to help, said Mr. Nyirongo, the farmers’ union head. Malawi’s agriculture ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In Namasoko, after officials came with the warning, there were few signs of government help, residents said. Mr. Bonongwe, the chief, said 20 farmers had received coupons.
The power of a disaster to derail people’s lives is obvious in and around Namasoko. In 2023, waters from Cyclone Freddy cascaded down a mountain, tearing through town in what one resident described as a “porridge of mud and stone.” The flood washed away the brick home of Enock John, 63, along with the possessions inside, and sent him and his family on a yearslong saga of recovery.
They spent a month sleeping in a church. Months more under a tent. A few years squatting on his brother’s property. Clawing back money by growing rice. But even then, they were able to get enough money to start rebuilding the family home — $345 for bricks, $230 for labor — only because a nongovernmental organization was able to offer some cash.
One recent afternoon, Mr. John stood surveying the construction. Workers climbed scaffolding and scraped cement, and Mr. John, almost giddy, joked about his wealth to several neighbors. The roof would come on in five days. The end of the journey.
“It was very difficult,” he said.
This time, he’d planted a row of trees between his home and the mountain, perhaps enough to protect against a future flood, he said.
But it was the last of his money. He had nothing left to deal with a coming drought.
Biking to Mozambique
With planting season coming, Mr. Mankhanamba, the farmer who’s been cycling to Mozambique to buy potatoes, has been waking up at 2 a.m. and mounting his single-speed bike to make the ride.
Mr. Mankhanamba said he’d started the occasional cross-border treks a few years ago to make extra money, because recent growing seasons had been tough and because he had two children, ages 6 and 10, to feed. But more recently, he said, he had become “extremely worried” about El Niño.
So he’s been making the trips more often, up to three times per week. “I’m off again tomorrow morning,” Mr. Mankhanamba said.
Two days later he was back, and he had hoped to till his fields. “I woke up saying, ‘I’m going to do farming,’ — but arghh, I feel like I can’t do it,” Mr. Mankhanamba said. His knees hurt too badly.
He had also miscalculated. His wife told him the family had no food left to eat.
In that moment, he said, he felt any notion of saving money melting away. He set aside some of the potatoes for his family. And whatever else they sold would go toward buying more food — not toward purchasing seeds.
The bicycle journeys were taxing not only physically, but mentally. The scenery is “not so beautiful,” he said, and he found himself reflecting on the purpose of his life and the seemingly inescapable loop he was stuck in. On the rides, he asked himself: “How can I help my children? What can I do to get out of this situation?”
Mr. Mankhanamba didn’t yet have an answer. So for now his best hope, he said, was getting back on the bike.
