El Niño Has Arrived to Colombia

El Niño is a phenomenon that affects mainly the water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, but it can affect many places across the world. It was first noticed by Peruvian and Chilean fishermen who named it as El Niño (word for the Christ child in Spanish), for it occurs around the Christmas season. When the warm water from Australia and Indonesia come to our coasts -fish does not have a lot of nutrients-, a severe drought occurs in several departments in Colombia at the west and north coasts, and at the centre and east part of the country, and flooding along the coast of South America, and it also causes the production of Atlantic hurricanes so the agriculture and fishing economy suffers greatly. Scientists do not understand completely the El Niño yet. There is no clear cause and no way to know how long it will affect or how strong it will get. So we must be prepared for this special hot summer that will make sweat more than usually.

In Colombia, the department that will suffer the most is Sucre. It has great crops of rice and cotton, and a great raising of cattle. So many people think that at the end of this year rice, cotton, meat, milk and other products will be more expensive. And there will be light rationalization as the hydroelectric power plants will not have enough water to produce energy. According to this, we will suffer a lot with these hot days that we have started to live from the last month. All this means that they will not earn any money for months and they will get a lot of debts. And, for many others, the price of some foods is increasing as well as the price of drinks, air conditioners, fans, refrigerators and clothes. And this changes will cause other types of changes.

I think that El Niño does not only change the condition of the atmosphere, but many other things that have to do with our daily life. For example, the economy is changing. For most agriculture people, it is causing a decrease in their profits. They not only will have a little production, but in many cases, they will have no production.

As the El Niño will last until next May, we should be attentive of the news about this event, and help doing easy things such as not wasting too much energy or water. But most of all, we should not pollute our planet for these types of phenomena will not occur any more.