El Niño: Blessing waiting to be harnessed

In the maize country around Kitale and Eldoret, this season’s crop has failed. The long-rains maize that Trans Nzoia and Uasin Gishu send to the national granary was hit by a sudden dry spell.

For a country that treats maize as the line between a good year and a hungry one, this is alarming. Many a farmer did not have crop insurance, and livelihoods will be hit hard throughout the regions.

Yet the fuller story, drawn from satellite records and years of climate data, is more hopeful.

The failure was cruelly precise. The crop began well; the March planting rains were, if anything, heavier than usual. Then in June the rain simply stopped. Both counties recorded just 33 millimetres against a 15-year average of 118mm – the driest June on record, with temperatures two degrees hotter than normal. June is around when maize flowers, the one stage it cannot afford heat and drought. Pollen dried, silks withered, cobs came up empty. A crop that looked healthy in May was hollowed out in weeks.

These two counties grow a single maize crop a year; typically, what is lost cannot be replanted until 2027. A loss of 40 to 60 per cent would cost the nation between 298,000 and 447,000 tonnes (roughly three weeks of national consumption). It is a real shock, but not a famine.

The danger is timing: this grain would reach market from September, so its absence bites hardest in the lean months of early 2027, when supplies are low and grain is expensive.

Luckily, we have a strong El Niño forecasted, now better than 90 per cent likely for the short rains, promising a wet period. Every one of Kenya’s 47 counties is greener than normal this year. The rain to come will fall on ready ground. That is the rescue.

An alternative grain source must be activated to seal this gaping hole in the national maize balance. The Lake Basin plants into the October short rains, and El Niño waters land there at the right moment, harvesting by January/February. Add fast-maturing maize varieties across the Rift, surplus grain from Tanzania and Uganda, and substitute crops such as wheat, sunflower and beans on idled north rift fields, and the country can find about 544,000 tonnes, enough to bridge even the deepest loss, largely without importing.

But none of this will happen automatically. Seed, lime and fertiliser must reach farmers before October, an investment that pays back two to four times over in imports avoided. Flood-prone counties need drainage now. And farmers who answer the call need a guaranteed price through contract farming and a national grain exchange, so a later surplus does not punish them.

Whether 2026 is remembered as the year the breadbasket failed, or the year the rain saved the harvest is a question of preparation.

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Dr Mujibi works at the Strathmore Agri-Food Innovation Centre.