El Nino's Impact on Asia

Much of South-east Asia is also going through its worst drought in decades, disrupting crop production and water supplies. The Philippines, which got less than its usual supply of typhoons this year, recently imposed water rationing as dam levels fell below critical levels.

India's monsoon had a poor ending, and north-east China has suffered drought conditions.

In short, the El Nino weather phenomenon continues to disrupt lives and economies in Asia. And experts say El Nino, which means 'the boy child' in Spanish, will continue throwing its tantrums well into the next year.

''We can't say for sure how long this El Nino will last, but the general tendency is they last about 12 months. The models predict that it may end in April,'' said Neville Nichols of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Others say it could last till the first half of 1998.

That means there are several months more of problems to come, prompting agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other humanitarian groups to launched assistance programmes to help drought victims.

This month, the Red Cross launched a global appeal for 8 to 10 million Swiss francs to preposition supplies in pars of Africa, Latin America and Asia to deal with effects, ICRC secretary general George Weber said in Manila recently.

El Nino is a vast pool of abnormally warm water brought about by changes in atmospheric pressure and ocean movements in the equatorial Pacific, which brings heavy rains to some parts of the world and drought to others.

El Nino, called such because it usually occurs around Christmas time, used to take shape every two to seven years but has been happening more frequenly in recent years.

Australia has been suffering from abnormal dryness since June, laying parts of eastern Australia, including New South Wales and Queensland, open to brushfires especially now that it is summer here.

Australian experts say the drought could have been much worse. But Mary Voice of the climate analysis unit at the Bureau of Meteorology said: ''The main concern is that dams are low as farmers head into summer, and that the subsoil moisture is low means more vulnerability to bushfire''.

Drought brought by El Nino is also making it harder for farmers to feed their livestock and keep farms productive, especially seen against the cumulative effects caused by previous El Nino episodes. This is especially a problem in Queensland, which has had low rainfall forseven or eight years now.

Past El Nino cycles hold lessons for the future, experts say. Nichols says the first clearly recorded episode of El Nino affecting Australia took place in 1791 and ''nearly destroyed'' New South Wales. The white settlers were forced to import food from overseas, while the aborigines fared better in coping with its effects.

Australian experts recall that during the 1982 El Nino, trailers of sheep had to be shot and dumped because they could no longer be supported.

The Indonesian forest fires that peaked earlier in the year ere worsened by the El Nino drought, which delayed the monsoon and brought below average rainfall. Experts say the pollutive haze caused by the fires was probably the worst in living memory.

''It's El Nino that made that possible,'' said Barrie Hunt of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Areas of Indonesia like Java and Irian Jaya are suffering acute shortages of water. Red Cross officials who went to Irian Jaya in September reported that ''a drought, coupled with nocturnal frost, had seriously affected the southern part of the island's central mountainous area''.

''Destroyed crops and dried-up water sources make access to drinking water and fish difficult,'' a Red Cross report said, adding that some 90,000 of an estimated population of 400,000 are already showing signs of malnutrition.

This makes locals more prone to diseases like malaria or dysentery, not least because the hardest-hit areas are isolated. Political unrest owing to an independence movement has not made intervention easy, prompting the Red Cross to offer to step in and help.

''There is hunger from crop failures in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and acute water shortages in Java, due t the same climate factors which are affecting (parts of) Australia,'' said professor Graham Harris of the CSIRO.

Papua New Guinea as been hit by a mix of drought and frost, even as half a million people face starvation while food supply is disrupted in highland areas and rivers dry up.

The Australian aid agency AUSaid says Tabubil, one of the wettest places in Papua New Guinea, received only 32 mm of rain in August, compared to the average of 870 mm for that month.

While this is not the first time PNG has been affected by El Nino, it seems to be having a harder time coping than during the nineties.

The South Pacific has seen months of abnormal behaviour with El Nino around, with the eastern part expecting tropical cyclones and those at the far western part expecting fewer of them.

In a report issued in late November, scientists Reid Basher and Xiaogu Zheng of the Wellington-based National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research said tropical cyclones are expected to be ''more frequent'' at this time. They said the devastating impact of cyclone Martin on the northern Cook Islands in late October was a sample of what may well lie ahead.

A record 16 cyclones occurred during the last big El Nino in 1982 to 1983, with more than the usual number developng into major hurricanes. ''Many of these struck in the Cook Islands and French Polynesia where ordinarily none occur,'' Basher added, as warm tropical seas and areas that nurture cyclones move into areas that do not normally have these disturbances.

After studying data for the last 20 years, Basher and Zheng's study shows that the risk for the South Pacific getting cyclones rose 28 percent during ''strong El Nino events''.

Harris says greater regional action is needed to combat the effects of El Nino, which affects entire continents. Recently, climate experts from Indonesia and Australia met to exchange information and compare ways to deal with the wrath of the El Nino.

Next: Economical Impacts on Asia