FAO Urges Action by February–March as Farm Climate Finance Slips to $26.9 Billion

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has put a seasonal calendar on El Niño preparation, telling UN News that protective measures for farmers need to be in place by February or March if the next harvest is to be shielded. The comments came from Kaveh Zahedi, FAO Assistant Director-General and head of the agency's climate office, interviewed on the sidelines of the 81st General Debate at UN Headquarters in New York and published by UN News on 22 September 2026.

"There's plenty we can do," Zahedi said in the interview. "We have a lead time… [but] we've got to act quickly because the window is shrinking." He described the target as getting measures in place "by February, March to, in essence, safeguard the next harvest" — a range, not a single cut-off.

A hazard with lead time

The World Meteorological Organization, according to the same UN News report, says the Pacific pattern is strengthening rapidly and that its effects are already registering in climate-sensitive sectors. "We expect this El Niño to be very strong. That's actually the top classification that we have. We don't go stronger than that," a WMO spokesperson said at a briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, the day the General Debate opened. The UN News item does not name the spokesperson or identify the briefing document, so the remark cannot be traced further from this source alone.

WMO expects the event to peak towards the end of the year, but warns in wording quoted by UN News that "the peak is a forecast, not a finish line", with impacts continuing beyond it. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, quoted in the article, framed the situation as one of unusual foreknowledge: "We have the forecast. We have the science."

FAO says it layers more than four decades of data on how earlier strong events affected agriculture on top of WMO's basin-scale monitoring. Combined with current conditions, seasonal forecasts and food-insecurity information, the agency says that archive can narrow risk to particular places — in some cases to a resolution of roughly one square kilometre. "When you put these two pieces of information together, you get a fairly good idea of where the big El Niño impacts are going to be and how they're going to undermine food and food security," Zahedi said.

FAO's current assessment, as reported by UN News, points to a high chance of agricultural drought in Southern Africa and the Sahel, Central America's Dry Corridor, and parts of South and Southeast Asia. In other regions the agency expects heavier rainfall and flooding to be the larger threat, with unusually warm waters capable of disrupting fisheries and coastal livelihoods.

What the interview does not specify

The UN News report carries no index values: it gives no Niño 3.4, ONI or NINO.3 figure, no averaging period and no threshold behind WMO's "very strong" label, which the spokesperson described only as the top rung of that organization's own scale. Readers comparing this with other national agencies' categories should note that the document does not set out how WMO's classification relates to any other body's definitions. Background on the indices themselves is on our science and glossary pages.

Finance moving the other way

Zahedi argued the event is arriving on warmer ground: "El Niño now is building on a much higher baseline… It's a hotter world that the El Niño is happening in, which means it's going to be magnifying some of the impacts."

As a reference case, UN News cites the 2023 to 2024 strong event, during which Morocco's cereal yields fell by 43 per cent amid extreme heat and drought, and Southern Africa endured what the report calls its worst drought in more than a century — 61 million people needing assistance, more than eight million pushed into food insecurity, and higher prices for some staple foods internationally. "We have a glimpse of what happened last time when we weren't prepared," Zahedi said.

The measures FAO describes are practical ones: drought-resistant seed, water storage, soil health, livestock protection and warnings early enough for farmers to change planting dates or crops. Funding, however, is described as contracting. A forthcoming FAO analysis — cited in the interview but not yet published, and therefore not available for readers to check — finds climate-related development finance for agrifood systems fell 10 per cent in 2024 to $26.9 billion, with crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries receiving about five per cent of total climate-related development finance and African flows down 20 per cent even as overall climate finance to the continent rose.

"Not enough is going into the productive sectors and building that resilience," Zahedi said. "That needs to increase if we want to safeguard food security, especially in an El Niño year."