⚠️ Heads up: this article is from our "experimental era" — a beautiful mess of enthusiasm ✨, caffeine ☕, and user-submitted chaos 🤹. We kept it because it’s part of our journey 🛤️ (and hey, everyone has awkward teenage years 😅).
South Africa is considering importing significant amounts of white corn, a staple food, for the first time since 2017 due to the withering effect of the El Niño weather pattern on crops. Dry and unseasonably hot weather this year has diminished harvest forecasts, causing the government's Crop Estimates Committee to cut its outlook for the white-corn crop by 11% to 6.28 million tons. Overall, the harvest is projected at a five-year low of 13.3 million tons, including the yellow variety. This weather phenomenon poses a significant challenge to South Africa's staple food production.