The Rains May Fail, Policy Dare Not

Jul 31 , 2026.

Weldu Yiheysh has not read the Pacific temperature charts. He does not need to. In Shibta District of Enderta Wereda, in the Tigray Regional State, the farmer was still waiting two weeks ago to sow the crops that should feed his family.

Much of the District had received no meaningful rain this season. Where farmers planted after brief showers, the clouds vanished again, leaving seeds in dry soil. Weldu bought fertiliser and seed with great difficulty, and their value now hangs on a sky that has become unreliable.

His predicament captures the danger hovering in northern Ethiopia (covering the Amhara, Tigray and Afar regional states and beyond the broader region) more clearly than any climate model.

Ethiopia is watching the early stages of a food, fiscal and humanitarian emergency forecast well in advance, and for which neither the government nor its international partners appears adequately mobilised. The disaster is predictable, prevention is cheaper than relief, and the money to prevent it remains largely theoretical.

The warning is unusually blunt. El Niño conditions have formed in the tropical Pacific and are gaining force fast. By mid-July, the closely watched Niño 3.4 index had climbed to 2.1 degrees Celsius above normal. Twenty-three of 26 forecasting models projected the phenomenon would turn "very strong" toward the end of this year.

For Ethiopia, this would be no distant disturbance. The World Meteorological Organisation's (WMO) regional outlook projects below-normal rainfall across much of the Greater Horn of Africa, with the probability above 60pc in central, north-eastern and north-western Ethiopia and as high as 80pc in parts of the north-east, alongside a late onset.

Some areas could see flooding, but across the rain-fed farms of the north and centre the danger is prolonged moisture stress in the months that decide whether households harvest food or enter the next year with empty stores.

The most frightening fact is not that drought may be coming, but that it is coming to a country already deep in hunger caused by weather changes compounded by ongoing multiple conflicts.

An estimated 15.8 million Ethiopians face acute food insecurity, another 4.6 million children and women suffer acute malnutrition, and 4.4 million are internally displaced. According to the Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO), it will take close to 125 million dollars merely to assist 4.4 million of them this year.

Nearly one in eight Ethiopians is already acutely hungry before the full weight of El Niño lands. Drought will not conjure the crisis from nothing. It will strike people whose livestock, savings, health and coping mechanisms have already been drained by conflict, inflation and repeated shocks, pushing those barely surviving into destitution and the destitute into a struggle for life.

The Tigray Regional State offers the most disturbing preview. The region is still emerging from a war that damaged farms, irrigation, roads and markets. Ironically, the possibility of another devastating war is on the horizon, a prospect that can and must be avoided.

Hundreds of hectares of farmland were damaged, and nearly half the region's arable land remains inaccessible. Output has recovered but sits an estimated 20pc to 30pc below its pre-war level. Last year, about 2.5 million people needed food aid, where about 83pc of people depend on the land. Into that comes another failed season.

The regional assessment places 21 districts at extreme risk of severe moisture stress, 16 critically vulnerable and 13 at moderate risk, with 86 rainfall stations yet to record meaningful precipitation and nearly 240 reporting rainfall far below normal. Each station stands for communities where crops may not germinate, wells may fail, and parents may begin cutting meals.

In a durable economy, one poor season is painful. In a war-damaged one, where fundamental political differences between the TPLF and the federal government remain in a quagmire, it can be ruinous. However, the damage would not stop at the farm.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates that the worst-hit countries could lose one to two percent of GDP, with combined African losses of 10 billion dollars to 20 billion dollars.

The FAO and the World Food Programme (WFP) have launched a 202 million-dollar appeal to protect 8.8 million people across 22 countries, including Ethiopia, at about 23 dollars each. They can reach 1.2 million now but need another 167 million dollars for the remaining 7.6 million.

Against that, the AfDB reckons Africa could need as much as 100 billion dollars this year. The figures are not like-for-like, one covering broad adaptation and the other specific humanitarian action. Yet the gap exposes a political truth that the world will calculate the cost of disaster long before it will finance prevention.

For Ethiopia, a failed harvest would feed straight into food inflation, cut rural income and raise the cost of humanitarian imports. It could lift defaults among farmers, cooperatives and traders, eventually reaching banks and microfinance institutions, while forcing costly grain imports that squeeze scarce foreign currency and pulling federal money from development toward relief.

This is the climate-finance trap, in which governments wait until disaster has destroyed livelihoods and then raid already stretched development budgets to pay for survival.

In fairness, the response is not blank. The federal budget for the current fiscal year allocates nearly 56 billion Br to food security, including about 5.9 billion Br for productive safety-net programmes in Tigray Regional State.

But a budget line is not a drought mobilisation. There is still no clearly communicated national El Niño financing envelope, no public inventory of emergency grain, seed, fodder and water, and no district-level trigger system showing when a forecast automatically releases money.

The dominant response remains bureaucratic rather than operational, a procession of assessments, committees and task forces that are useful but do not put seed in farmers’ hands.

Even the risk note attached to the IMF's latest review of Ethiopia’s economy treats drought as a threat to be met largely by scaling up humanitarian aid once affected areas are identified. To forecast, wait, assess the damage and appeal for help is the old and most expensive model.

Policymakers at the federal government can set up a national El Niño operation with authority over agriculture, finance, water, health, transport and disaster management, and publish a district-by-district risk map, tying each level of risk to predetermined action. Federal funds can be automatically released when rainfall or vegetation crosses an agreed threshold.

Seed and fertiliser can be pre-positioned where replanting is possible, fodder, veterinary medicine and water moved toward pastoral areas before animals die, and grain bought before prices climb. Banks and microfinance institutions can identify climate-exposed loans and restructure repayments, cheaper than letting viable farmers collapse after one bad season.

Above all, the federal government should disclose what resources exist and what is missing, because silence breeds rumour, not calm. International partners should front-load grants rather than finance camps later, and climate funds should let a country act on a forecast without years of paperwork.

Citizens facing hunger have to be fed now, even as irrigation and grain markets are built for the future. What Ethiopia cannot afford is the familiar cycle in which every drought is treated as a surprise. The rains may fail, but policy dare not.

PUBLISHED ON Jul 31,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1370]