• NOAA puts El Niño at a 97% chance of persisting into early 2027 and an 81% chance of a very strong event in October to December, one that would rank among the largest since 1950
• Zimbabwe’s Meteorological Services Department reads a 65% chance of below-normal rainfall for the 2026/27 season
• The last strong El Niño cut Zimbabwe’s 2024 GDP growth to 2.0 percent, contracted agriculture 15 percent, decimated 80 percent of the crop, and left 6 million food insecure. Maize imports ran at US$48.1 million in a single month.
• Cabinet has approved a six-pillar response and targets a 600,000 tonne strategic grain reserve by mid-2027. The reserve stands at 227,338 tonnes today, so the buffer is 63 percent unbuilt with the planting window months away

Harare- The Centre for Climate System Research and International Research Institute for Climate and Society multi-model forecast issued in July 2026 has pointed Zimbabwe toward below-normal rainfall across the coming rainy season, with the dry tilt strengthening from October through the December to February core of the season as a strong El Niño intensifies. The map for the August to October window shows most of Zimbabwe under climatological odds, which is expected, since that period is the country’s dry season and carries little forecast information.

The El Niño call has moved from probability to near certainty. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s July advisory places the event at a 97% chance of persisting into early 2027 and an 81% chance of reaching very strong intensity during October to December, a level that would rank among the largest in the record back to 1950.

The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory’s model runs are starker, with every ensemble member producing a peak at least competitive with the strongest events of the past century. This is no longer a question of whether an El Niño forms, but how hard it lands.

For Zimbabwe the direction of that effect is not ambiguous. El Niño warms the central and eastern Pacific and shifts the atmospheric circulation in a way that historically suppresses rainfall over southern Africa, the opposite of the wetter conditions the same pattern tends to bring to East Africa and the Horn. The forecast map carries that fingerprint plainly, with a strong dry tilt across Australia and the maritime continent and a wet tilt over the Horn of Africa and southern South America. Zimbabwe’s own Meteorological Services Department, drawing on the same global centres, reads an 88 to 94% chance of El Niño and a 65% chance of below-normal rainfall for the 2026/27 season.

The reason this matters beyond a weather report is that Zimbabwe has just lived the experiment, and the cost is documented. The 2023/24 El Niño produced the country’s worst drought in 40 years. Gross domestic product growth fell to 2% in 2024 on a 15% contraction in agriculture, against agricultural growth of 6.3% the year before. Official assessments recorded 80% of the crop decimated, with 40% rated poor and 60% written off entirely across the main growing areas. Around 6 million people were left food insecure, the government declared a national disaster in April 2024, and it costed the response at US$2 billion.

The fiscal and external transmission is where a repeat threatens the wider economy. Maize imports reached US$48.1 million in the single month of June 2024, placing grain among the country’s top three imports alongside diesel and petrol, and one private consortium alone planned to bring in 1.4 million tonnes of maize at a cost near US$518 million. Every one of those dollars is foreign currency spent on food that a normal season grows at home, and it lands on the same balance of payments the de-dollarisation strategy needs to keep in surplus. A drought import bill of that scale would pull directly against the reserves holding the ZiG exchange rate steady.

Power is the second channel, and it runs through one lake. The 2024 drought dropped Lake Kariba to levels that forced deep cuts to hydroelectric generation, which supplies most of Zimbabwe’s and Zambia’s electricity, and the resulting shortages hit manufacturing output directly. A very strong El Niño threatens a repeat of that sequence at a moment when the mining sector’s beneficiation drive, the ferrochrome smelters and the new steel capacity are all adding demand to a grid that cannot meet its current load. Drought in Zimbabwe is an industrial event as much as an agricultural one, transmitted through the water level at Kariba.

Livestock carry a slower and larger loss. The government estimates that 2.5 million cattle out of a national herd of 5.7 million would be at risk under a severe drought, and the 2024 event killed at least 9,000 head before mitigation reached the worst areas. Cattle are the principal store of wealth in Zimbabwe’s communal farming areas, so herd losses on that scale destroy rural balance sheets that take years to rebuild, and they arrive on top of a crop failure that has already removed the season’s cash income. The damage compounds where it can least be absorbed.

The regional dimension removes Zimbabwe’s usual escape route. In 2024 the country and at least five other southern African states leaned on imports from South Africa, the regional grain powerhouse that escaped the worst of that drought. A strong El Niño does not respect borders, and the South African Weather Service is already warning of below-normal rainfall across its own summer maize belt for the 2026/27 season. Analysts there note that the 2023/24 drought, a comparatively mild mid-summer event, still cut the South African maize harvest 22% to 12.9 million tonnes from 16.5 million.

A regional drought that hits the supplier as well as the buyers thins the maize available for import and lifts its price at the same time, so Zimbabwe would import less grain at a higher cost into a harder currency.

Against that backdrop the government has moved earlier than it did last time, and the plan is the right shape. Cabinet has approved a six-pillar drought response built around a larger strategic grain reserve, expanded conservation farming under Pfumvudza and Intwasa, livestock protection, water conservation and provision for food imports. The headline target is a strategic grain reserve of 600,000 tonnes by mid-2027, set explicitly against the lesson of 2024, when the state had to mobilise 328,000 tonnes to feed 6.5 million people. Preparedness beats response, and starting in July, not the following April, is the single most important improvement over the last cycle.

The gap in that plan is the logic of the reserve. The strategic grain reserve stood at 227,338 tonnes at the latest July Cabinet briefing, so reaching 600,000 tonnes requires building a further 372,662 tonnes, meaning 63% of the buffer does not yet exist. The grain to fill it has to come from the 2025/26 harvest that has just landed, a good crop grown under the favourable rains of a La Niña year, because the next harvest will be the drought-hit one. That places a premium on GMB procurement over the next three months.

The route through is the one Zimbabwe has been building for other reasons, and the drought raises its value. Irrigation is the direct hedge against rain failure, and the expansion of irrigated area from 171,000 hectares in 2020 to 258,773 hectares in 2026 is the part of the agricultural strategy that a strong El Niño makes most urgent, since irrigated hectares do not depend on the season. Conservation farming under Pfumvudza and Intwasa raises the yield the crop takes from whatever rain falls, and drought-tolerant seed shortens the exposure. None of these removes the risk for the coming season, where the crop mix and the water plans are largely set, and their value is in how much of the 2027 harvest can be secured against a Pacific that the models say will not relent until early in that year.

The honest truth is that Zimbabwe is not safe from this season, and safety was never the available outcome. A very strong El Niño arriving on a documented 40-year-drought analogue, confirmed by every major forecasting centre, is a risk to be managed and not one to be avoided. What is within the country’s control is the size of the loss, and that turns on three things over the next 90 days, being how much grain the reserve secures before the dry season sets, how far the import and forex plan is arranged in advance of a regional price spike, and whether the water and power contingencies at Kariba are put in place before the level falls and not after it.

Watchpoints, 30 to 90 days

There are four key risks to track:First, the regional SARCOF and national NACOF forecasts coming at the end of August. These will tell us expected rainfall by province. Second, GMB’s grain buying. They’ve only hit 227,338 tonnes of the 600,000 tonne goal, and they need to buy while grain is still available.

The third is Lake Kariba’s water level. It’s the first sign of power and factory problems like in 2024.

Fourth, maize imports and foreign currency. We need to arrange these early, before prices go up, especially since South Africa is also expecting poor rains.

 Equity Axis News