El Niño: Undermining Resilience - Implications of El Niño in Southern Africa from a Food and Nutrition Security Perspective

This document serves to outline El Niño’s major implications on food and nutrition security in the southern Africa region and highlights immediate and long-term preparedness requirements. Further, it provides country profiles to give contextual national information for Angola, Botswana, DRC, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Southern Africa’s unprecedented El Niño-related drought and weather-related stress has triggered a second shock-year of hunger and hardship for poor and vulnerable people with serious consequences that will persist until at least to the next harvest in 2017. Already an estimated 15.9 million people in southern Africa are highly food insecure, not including a growing number in South Africa, and more than 40 million rural and 9 million poor urban people are at risk due to the impacts of El Niño’s related drought and erratic rainfall.