A "super" El Niño is forming — and analysts warn it could push global food prices up into 2028

Food & Farming 4 min 80 sources

Economists say a historically strong El Niño could jolt world food prices while the Iran war is already lifting them — two shocks landing at once on the same shelves.

Key takeaways

Analysts warn a rare "super" El Niño could push global food prices up into 2028 — landing on top of inflation the Iran war already started.
The danger isn't one bad harvest; it's many at once, because El Niño tilts weather the same way across several breadbaskets, straining the usual cover of "a good year somewhere else."
It's already showing at the edges — drought deaths in Uganda, a drier Indian monsoon, and thin US grain stocks going into the season.

Two shocks, one shelf

Economists are warning that a “super” El Niño forming in the Pacific this year could hit harvests worldwide and drive a food-price shock lasting into 2028 [5]. It lands at an awkward moment: the Iran war has already pushed world food prices to their highest in three years, so supply chains now face “two shocks at once,” analysts said [5].

El Niño is a natural cycle. It forms when shifting winds let warmer water spread across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which reshuffles rainfall and temperature across much of the planet [5]. Last month the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — NOAA, the American weather agency — put the odds at 63% that Pacific sea-surface temperatures run more than 2C above normal later this year [5]. Forecasters call an event that size a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño.

Why one ocean moves every dinner table

The reason a warm patch of ocean can reprice food on every continent is that El Niño doesn’t hit one place — it tilts the weather the same way across many places at once. It typically raises drought risk in southern Africa and northern South America, while flooding southern Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay [5]. That means several of the world’s breadbaskets can stumble in the same season.

Goldman Sachs estimates this El Niño could drive a 15.8% surge in global food commodity prices, feeding through to a 1.3% rise in eurozone food prices [5]. The full effect takes time — Goldman said the consequences might not be “fully realised” until the second half of 2028, because different crops plant, grow and harvest on different clocks [5]. UBS put the mechanism plainly: “El Niño does not affect agriculture uniformly. It reshapes global rainfall and temperature patterns, creating regional winners and losers” [5].

There is a longer memory here. The El Niño of 1876-78 helped trigger catastrophic droughts and famine across China, southern Africa, Brazil, Egypt and India — with more than 6 million dead in India alone [5]. Recent strong events in 1981-82, 1996-97, 2015-16 and 2023-24 were far milder, but NOAA’s projections suggest the 2026-27 cycle could be stronger still [5].

The brake that usually holds

A study published this month offers the flip side — and it’s oddly reassuring. Researchers led by the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar examined climate records from 1901 to 2020 and found that droughts around the world rarely synchronise: at any moment, simultaneous drought hit only 1.8% to 6.5% of the planet’s land, far below earlier fears of up to a sixth [7]. Ocean temperature patterns, they argue, act as a natural brake — creating regional dry spots while stopping the whole planet from drying out together [7].

That is exactly why a super El Niño matters. It is the event that can override the brake, pushing more of those regional failures into the same window. The usual protection — that a bad harvest here is covered by a good one there — is the thing under strain.

Where it’s already biting

This is not only a forecast. In north-eastern Uganda, the government says at least 16 people have died of hunger in recent weeks after a prolonged drought destroyed crops in the Karamoja region, which had little or no rain since April [6]. In India, a drier monsoon has already begun affecting crops [5]. And the world enters this with thin cushions: the USDA’s July supply-and-demand report cut its estimate of US corn stocks left at season’s end below both the prior month and what traders expected [1].

The price signal is already visible in some places. In Japan, wholesale inflation hit a three-year high as fuel costs and a weak yen bit [37], and processed foods have been among the hardest hit by price rises tied to the Middle East conflict [17]. In the US, grocery prices cooled slightly last month even as overall inflation jumped on an energy spike [13] — a reminder that food and fuel prices don’t always move together, and that today’s calm can precede a delayed shock.

What it means at the till

The honest read: this is a warning built on analyst forecasts, not a harvest already lost — treat the numbers as projections, and the 2028 timeline as a spread, not a date. But the direction is worth holding. If a strong El Niño takes hold, the foods to watch are the ones grown in the regions it dries or floods — sugar, palm oil, rice, coffee, cocoa — and the effect will arrive slowly, crop by crop, rather than all at once. Lower-income countries, already hit hardest by the Iran conflict, are the ones analysts expect to suffer most [5].

02 · Lesson · why it matters

When all your baskets tip the same way

Spreading a risk keeps you safe only while the risks stay independent — one shared cause can knock out every backup at the same moment.

The comfort in “grown everywhere”

There is a quiet reassurance in knowing your food comes from everywhere. Wheat from Kansas and Ukraine and Australia. Coffee from Brazil and Vietnam and Ethiopia. Rice from India, Thailand, the Mekong. If one place has a bad year, another covers it. The price wobbles and settles. Nobody goes hungry because a single farm failed.

That comfort is real, and most years it earns its keep. It is the reason a drought in one country doesn’t empty your shelf. But it rests on a hidden condition — one so obvious nobody says it out loud. It only works if the failures don’t happen together.

The bet underneath the shelf

Spreading a risk across many places is a bet. The bet is that the places are independent: that whatever ruins the harvest here has nothing to do with what happens there. Under that bet, a bad year is a local accident, and local accidents cancel out. Some regions are up, some are down, and the average holds.

The global food system runs on this bet, mostly without knowing it. It keeps thin reserves because it trusts the spread. This month the USDA marked US corn stocks going into the season below what traders expected — a small cushion, held small on purpose, because carrying a big one is expensive. Thin cushions are fine when failures are scattered. The whole arrangement assumes they will be.

What El Niño actually does

Now look at what a “super” El Niño is. It is not a bigger drought in one place. It is a single change in the Pacific — warm water spreading east — that reaches out and tilts the weather the same way across many places at once. Dry in southern Africa. Dry in northern South America. Floods in Argentina and southern Brazil. A thinner monsoon over India, already begun.

Feel the difference. An ordinary bad year is an accident that visits one region. El Niño is a common cause that visits many. When it arrives, the harvests that were supposed to fail independently start failing together — for the same reason, in the same season. The bet that held the system up is exactly the bet that comes undone.

This is why the analysts talk about a shock rather than a shortage. A shortage is one crop, one place. A shock is the discovery that your backups were never as separate as you thought.

The brake you never noticed

Here is the part that turns the lesson from clever to humble. Those same ocean patterns are usually what protect us. Researchers who mapped a century of droughts found they rarely synchronise — at any moment, simultaneous drought touches only a small slice of the planet’s land, far less than once feared. Something keeps the world’s dry spells from lining up. Ocean temperature swings, they argue, act as a natural brake, letting regions fail in turn rather than all at once.

So the safety you feel in “grown everywhere” isn’t really coming from the map. It’s coming from a brake in the ocean you never knew was there, quietly staggering the failures so the cover always seems to hold. You have been protected by a machine you didn’t know you were running.

A super El Niño is the event that leans on that brake. It doesn’t remove the diversification — the farms are still spread across the world. It removes the independence, which is the thing that made the spread worth anything.

Where you are standing in this

It’s tempting to read this as a story about distant farmers and commodity desks. It isn’t. The bet on independent failures is the reason your grocery bill has been steady, and you are inside it the same way the farmer in Karamoja is — the same climate signal that starved sixteen people in northern Uganda is the one an analyst prices into a 15.8% forecast. One event, felt as death at one end of the chain and a delayed 1.3% at the other. Same cause. Different distance from it.

And notice what you cannot see from where you stand. You cannot see the ocean brake. You cannot see the correlation building until the harvests are already coming in together. The people who carry thin reserves cannot see it either — that’s why the reserves are thin. Nobody in the chain is stupid; everybody is reading a system whose most important feature, whether the failures line up, is invisible until it’s happening.

That is the humbling part. The thing that keeps you fed most years is not the abundance you can see. It is an independence you can’t — a staggering of bad luck that holds until, one season, it doesn’t. Knowing that won’t lower a single price. But it might change how much faith you place in the word “diversified,” on a shelf or anywhere else.

03 · Lab · your turn

Spread the risk

Rehearse how sourcing from many regions guards against scattered bad harvests but not against one shared cause that fails them together.

04 · Hope · carry this

A century ago a super El Niño starved millions who never saw it coming; this one was named months before a single harvest failed. Being able to watch the shock form — and to map the ocean patterns that usually hold it back — is a kind of protection our great-grandparents never had.