A strong El Nino is coming for the world's staple crops - and the poorest eat the risk first

Food & Farming 4 min 12 sources

The UN's weather agency says a strong El Nino will intensify from August, threatening harvests across Africa and Asia. Where families lean on one cheap staple, a price rise hits hardest.

Key takeaways

The UN's weather agency says a strong El Nino will intensify from August, threatening staple-crop harvests across Africa and Asia.
Drought has already killed 19 people in Uganda's Karamoja region, where 1.5 million face acute food shortages.
Because staples are globally traded commodities, a harvest shock in one place lifts prices everywhere - and families who lean on one cheap staple feel it most.

The world’s weather is about to lean hard on its dinner plate. On 31 July the World Meteorological Organization, the UN’s weather agency, issued a warning [1]. A strong El Nino - a warming of the Pacific that scrambles rainfall worldwide - will intensify through August to October [1]. A warmer western Indian Ocean is forecast alongside it. That pairing can deepen drought, flooding and wildfire around the whole Indian Ocean basin [1]. For farmers, that is not a forecast about the sky. It is a forecast about the harvest.

The bill is already being counted. The African Development Bank’s top climate official told Reuters that a “super” El Nino could cost affected African countries between $10 billion and $20 billion [2]. That is 1 to 2 percent shaved off their economies, and enough to push people to migrate from the hardest-hit areas [2]. The threat runs through food and water before it reaches the banks, he said - drought is the mechanism, and hunger is the first symptom [2].

Where the drought has already bitten

In north-eastern Uganda, it is no longer a warning. The government began emergency food handouts in the Karamoja region after 19 people died from hunger following months of failed rains [3]. Around 1.5 million people there face acute shortages [3]. Authorities are distributing 9,400 tonnes of relief food [3]. It was bought with a 45-billion-shilling (about $12 million) emergency allocation - the first operation of its kind after aid cuts left a funding hole [3].

Karamoja shows the pattern in miniature. When the rains fail, the local staple crops fail with them, and families who grow most of what they eat have nothing to fall back on. There is no slack in a subsistence harvest: what the field doesn’t yield, the household doesn’t have.

A staple’s price is a global number

The same drought that empties one region’s fields moves prices on other continents, because the big staples are commodities. A commodity is a raw food traded as an interchangeable bulk good - one country’s wheat or rice is priced against everyone’s, so a shortage anywhere nudges the price everywhere. When a strong El Nino threatens several breadbaskets at once, the market prices in the risk before a single sack is short.

India, home to a fifth of humanity, is watching the sky. In Odisha’s farm districts the monsoon arrived so late that seeds went into dry ground [4]. Families are bracing for a “super” El Nino they fear will thin the rice harvest [4]. Nationally the picture is mixed: summer planting picked up as the monsoon revived in late July, which steadies the outlook for now [5]. But the margin is thin, and a strong El Nino landing on a late monsoon is exactly the combination growers dread.

Elsewhere the strain is already showing at the field edge. Farmers across several countries told the Guardian the pace of climate swings is now outrunning their ability to adapt - “it’s too fast, too big” [6]. In Britain, drought and heat have hit vegetable crops so hard that growers called it the worst they have known [10]. The country is leaning on imports to fill the gap [10].

The countries that subsidise the plate

Some governments stand between the world price and their poorest citizens by holding staple prices down - and that cushion is under pressure. Egypt, where bread is the national staple, held its subsidised loaf at a fixed price for decades before quadrupling it in 2024 [8]. Roughly two-thirds of Egyptians rely on that subsidised bread [8]. On 31 July the International Monetary Fund unlocked about $1.8 billion for Egypt after a review [7]. It cited the fuel-price adjustments and spending curbs the country has made under its $8 billion programme [7]. Those “adjustments” are, at the plate, the slow lifting of the lid the poor have leaned on.

Broader food-price pressure is stacking up too. India’s largest consumer firms are planning fresh price rises this quarter as the Middle East conflict pushes commodity costs up [9]. And the grain trade itself is jittery: a Russian grain lobby warned that Ukrainian attacks on Black Sea export terminals threaten shipments and, with them, global food security [11]. In the US, one steadier corner, crop-progress ratings for corn and soybeans slipped a little even as the plants developed fast [12].

What it means at the till

None of these lines has reached most kitchens yet - the harvests are still in the ground and the prices are still being set. But the direction is one to watch: a strong El Nino landing on staple crops, in a year when several supports are already stretched. For a shopper with room in the budget, a staple that costs more is an annoyance. For a family that already spends most of what it has on one cheap staple, it is the whole equation. And, as the lesson explains, the way they must respond is stranger than it looks.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The strange food the poor buy more of when it costs more

For a family living on one cheap staple, a price rise can push them to buy even more of it - because being poorer wins.

The rule everyone knows, and the one case it breaks

Prices go up, people buy less. It is the first thing anyone learns about how markets work, and almost always it holds. Bread costs more, you eat a bit less bread, or you switch to rice.

But there is one case where the rule flips. When the price of a poor family’s main staple rises, they can end up buying more of it, not less. This is not a rounding error or a trick of the data. It is a real pattern, and it explains why a bad harvest is so much crueller to the poorest than to anyone else.

Today’s news sets the trap. A strong El Nino is bearing down on staple crops across Africa and Asia. When those crops thin, staple prices climb. To see who gets hurt worst, you have to understand why some families respond by leaning harder on the very thing that got dearer.

Two forces hide inside every price change

When a price rises, two things happen to you at once, and they usually point the same way.

The first is the substitution effect. The dearer thing is now expensive relative to everything else, so you lean toward the cheaper alternatives. Rice is up, so you buy a little more pasta instead. This nudges you to buy less of what rose.

The second is the income effect. A price rise on something you buy makes you poorer in real terms - your money now stretches less far. For most things you buy a small slice of, this effect is tiny and easy to miss.

For most goods these two forces push together, and you simply buy less. The trouble comes when one household spends almost everything on one item.

When the staple is most of the budget

Picture a family that spends most of its food money on one cheap grain - rice, maize, cassava, or bread. The grain is dull, but it is calories per cent, and it keeps everyone fed. The little that is left over buys the extras: some vegetables, a bit of meat, an egg.

Now the grain’s price jumps. The substitution effect says: buy less grain, switch to something else. But there is nothing cheaper to switch to - the grain was already the cheapest way to fill a stomach.

Meanwhile the income effect is no longer tiny. Because the grain was most of the budget, its price rise has made the family sharply poorer. Suddenly the meat and vegetables are out of reach. Those extras were where the family got some of its calories - and now they are gone.

So the family faces a hole in its diet and less money than before. The only way to keep everyone fed on calories they can still afford is to buy more of the now-dearer grain. The income effect has overwhelmed the substitution effect. Demand rose as the price rose.

Why “just switch to something else” misses it

This is the point that comfortable advice keeps getting wrong. Tell a struggling family to swap the expensive staple for a cheaper option, and you assume a cheaper option exists. For the poorest, it often does not - the staple already was the floor.

Economists call this rare case a Giffen good, after the man credited with spotting it in the diets of Victorian workers. It only shows up under tight conditions: a household poor enough that one cheap staple dominates its spending, with no cheaper substitute below it. Which is exactly the household a staple-price spike lands on hardest.

The direction of the effect is the cruel part. A price rise that a richer shopper barely notices does not just cost a poor family more. It corners them into buying more of the thing that is squeezing them. The market’s usual escape hatch, “buy less, buy something else,” is bolted shut.

The web this sits inside

None of this stays in one kitchen. When millions of poor households respond to a staple-price rise by buying more of the staple, that extra demand pushes the price higher still. A shortage can feed on itself, hitting the people with the least room fastest. This is part of why governments guard staple prices so fiercely, and why cutting a bread subsidy is never just an accounting line.

It reaches the reader, too, further from the drought than the family in Karamoja but on the same board. The grain that family buys more of is a global commodity, priced against the wheat and rice on every continent. When a strong El Nino thins several harvests at once, the price it sets travels to a supermarket everywhere. It arrives gently for a shopper with slack in the budget, brutally for the one with none.

The lesson is not that markets are broken. The usual rule holds nearly everywhere. It is that the one place the rule breaks is the place that can least afford it. The same rise on the same tag can mean an inconvenience to one person and a corner with no exit to another.

03 · Lab · your turn

The staple trap

Rehearse how a poor family, when its cheap staple gets dearer, must buy even more of it to stay fed.

04 · Hope · carry this

A drought that once arrived as a surprise now arrives as a forecast, months ahead - and a warning is a head start. The same web that carries a shortage from one field to every shelf can carry grain, and warning, and help the other way just as fast.