Almost $4 billion is needed to meet the humanitarian demands of countries facing food shortages because of an El Nino-induced drought, the United Nations said.

About 60 million people, including 40 million in eastern and southern Africa, face a lack of food because of El Nino, which has scorched crops, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization said in a statement on its website Wednesday. With scientists forecasting an increasing likelihood of the opposite rain- and flood-inducing La Nina taking place, the number of those affected by the combined impacts of the events may reach 100 million, it said.

The El Nino-induced drought damaged crops from palm oil, rice and sugar in Asia to grains in southern Africa and robusta coffee in South America. Storms spurred by the phenomenon have wiped out harvests in Fiji and some of its neighboring island states, the FAO said.

The agency, together with the UN’s World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development, is “redoubling efforts to mitigate the negative impacts and capitalize on the opportunities of a likely La Nina phenomenon in the coming months,” it said. “Acting now will ensure that farmers have sufficient levels of agricultural inputs for upcoming planting seasons.”

Opportunity window

There is a three-month window before the start of southern Africa’s corn-planting season in which interventions such as distributing agricultural inputs “are urgently needed to avoid the dependence of millions of rural families on humanitarian assistance programs well into 2018,” the FAO said.

The organization is on standby to provide emergency seeds and tools in Vietnam, where drought and saltwater intrusion are threatening farmers’ livelihoods, where IFAD is also supporting growers. More than 7.6 million people have received food assistance from the WFP in Ethiopia and a further 260,000 have been helped in Papua New Guinea.