The Storm We Can See Coming (and the Ground That Can Blunt It)

I have spent much of my career with my hands in the soil, and it has taught me how to read it. Turn over a freshly plowed field at the end of a dry spring and the story is already there: pale, powdery earth with little structure left to hold the next rain. 

In mid-June, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued an El Niño Advisory: the event is no longer a forecast but a fact, present in the Pacific now and expected to strengthen into the winter of 2026–27, with NOAA putting the chance of a very strong episode (among the largest on record) at roughly 63% for the coming winter. For most people, this is just a headline in the news, but for the farmers of the Central American Dry Corridor and the degraded lands of southern Mexico, it is a countdown, and what their soil looks like when the rains fail will decide how the year ends.

We know what an episode like this can do, because we have lived it. During the last severe El Niño, in 2015–16, first-harvest losses across the Dry Corridor ran as high as 50% to 90% in the worst-hit communities, and more than 3.5 million people across the region needed humanitarian assistance. And it was not the first time: El Niño-linked droughts have battered the corridor repeatedly in recent decades, but the acute shock of a drought year lands on top of a chronic condition we too often ignore: the slow loss of the land itself. In Mexico, drylands cover roughly two-thirds of the national territory, and desertification (the most severe form of land degradation) already affects more than 40% of that, eroding harvests, draining public budgets, and pushing rural families to migrate. 

Here is the more hopeful half of that history: these losses are not inevitable. The difference between a drought that dents a harvest and one that destroys it is, more often than not, decided below the surface. Healthy soil is a shock absorber: rich in organic matter, it holds water through dry spells, releases nutrients when fertilizer is scarce or expensive, and gives a crop the margin it needs to survive a late or failing rain. Degraded soil does the opposite, as it sheds water, demands ever more inputs, and gives way under the first stress. 

For decades we treated farmland as if it were limitless, but the bill for that assumption now arrives with every dry year.

The pressures are converging. A Mexican farmer today faces not one challenge but several at once: fertilizer costs that are high and tied to imports, water that is scarcer and less predictable, land that is steadily losing fertility, and now an intensifying El Niño on top of it all. They look like separate problems, but they share one root, and one point of leverage: the soil.

This is what CIMMYT’s scientists and the farmers we work with have been proving in the field for decades. In Ocosingo, in the highlands of Chiapas, a research site has shown what happens when farmers stop burning their fields and start rebuilding them. Where they kept crop residues on the ground, added legumes and diversified what they planted, the results were striking: in the best cases, plots grew up to 271% more maize than fields where the stubble was burned and only a single crop was planted. And the soil itself came back to life, holding water through dry spells and regaining the fertility a crop needs to survive a late rain. In the drier north, in Sonora and Sinaloa, farmers reach the same place by a different route, using nitrogen-fixing cover crops to restore fertility naturally, leaning less on the costly fertilizers that eat into their profit margins. Less fertilizer, healthier soil, steadier yields; the agronomy and the economics point in the same direction. In Mexico, soil is a strategic asset that protects a farmer’s harvest, a lender’s loan, and a country’s food supply. 

But knowing what works is not enough; it has to reach the field before the rain fails, not after. So we are already acting. This May, CIMMYT convened a regional coalition to turn early warning into early action: to track the odds of El Niño, pinpoint the communities most at risk, and get practical, science-based advice into the hands of the farmers and governments who need it. Its partners have worked side by side in the region for years, earning the trust of farmers and governments and delivering real results. They range from Catholic Relief Services and other relief organizations to the Central American Agricultural Council, which connects the effort directly to national governments, and on to international research institutes and countries’ own agricultural agencies. It is precisely that accumulated, cross-border experience — public, private, and scientific — that has produced the gains in soil health and better farming the region can now build on.

The plan emerging from that work delivers, agroclimatic bulletins with practical, territory-specific advice; a regional inventory of drought- and heat-tolerant seed ready before planting; a shared package of field-tested measures (soil cover and conservation, adjusted planting calendars, resilient varieties, drought and heat tolerant alternative crops, agroecological pest management), and a common way to coordinate across borders so the guidance farmers receive is aligned, not fragmented. 

These efforts are converging on a larger ambition: an Agroinnovation Cluster for Central America, a standing network linking farmers, science, extension services, value chains, financing, and public and private actors so that proven solutions spread faster than the next drought. It all rests on decades of CIMMYT’s investment in people — the hundreds of sustainable-agriculture technicians we have certified and trained across Mexico and Central America who turn science into practice.

Every measure that builds resilience (adapted seeds, advice, soil health, the coordination that ties them together) has a cost, and today that cost falls too often on farmers alone. Sustained investment now, from governments, development partners, and the private sector alike, is what turns a forecast into a defense; the alternative is to keep paying, far more, in emergency aid, food-price spikes, and lost livelihoods once the harvest has already failed. We have the science. We have the networks. And this time, we have the warning.

Food security is strategic security, and in Mexico and Central America it begins, quite literally, from the ground up. This El Niño will test us, and with healthy soil beneath us and a region ready to act together, we can meet it standing.