How El Niño could spark a worldwide food crisis

Each purple carrot the farmers pull from the clumpy soil of West Sussex bears the scars of extreme weather. Many are huge and bulbous, or even double-tipped. Record heat and widespread drought across the UK this summer killed some seeds and left the surviving ones more room to grow. Following the sudden return of rain this autumn, which was also abnormally warm, some carrots split down the side and tiny sap-sucking whiteflies cluster under their green leaves. “If the crops are stressed, they’re more likely to get attacked,” says Tom Chadwick, who, along with his partner Rosa Farber, grows vegetables and fruit at Laines Organic Farm in the UK. Rain pours down as Chadwick and Farber work, an omen of the warm, wet, stormy weather that El Niño is expected to bring to the UK this autumn and winter, which will stress the produce further. Too much rain could rot carrots still in the ground, as well as the garlic, salad greens and broad beans they will plant in the next few weeks. Advertisement But the farmers also fear that frost could kill their apples, plums and pears in late winter, when El Niño can disrupt the polar vortex and release Arctic air into the UK. Or that another dry summer could again require long days of emergency watering. “It is worrying, the unpredictability of it,” says Farber. “It’s just an unknown.” Extreme weather from the record super El Niño will hit every continent. Whether that is flooding and typhoons or drought and wildfires, it will damage crops and threaten a food crisis, experts say. The result will be a tale of two socioeconomic statuses. People in high-income countries could face shortages and higher prices over the next 18 months. But those in low-income countries could suffer food insecurity or even famine. “The UK may be willing to pay top dollar,” says Christian Jaccarini at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK non-profit. “It doesn’t mean people won’t go hungry somewhere else.” After the hot, dry summer and its worst-ever cereals harvest, the UK now faces a “climate whiplash” to the opposite extreme. The last El Niño in 2023-24 led to the wettest six months ever observed in England and Wales. Waterlogged soils can prevent tractors from getting onto the fields, or keep seeds from germinating. The harvest of grains like winter wheat and barley declined by more than 20 per cent in 2023-24, costing farmers £1 billion – and that was a far smaller El Niño than the current one. Prices of bread, biscuits and beer are likely to rise next year, according to the consultancy Parker Walsh. So are beef and dairy prices, as both abnormally wet and dry weather forces farmers to rely on expensive feed rather than grazing. The worst impacts, however, are nearer to the tropics. Almost all recent El Niños have unleashed drought on Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia, the world’s top four coffee producers, and commodity market prices of Arabica have already jumped 30 per cent. While consumers in the Europe might have to cut back on coffee breaks, bean growers in South America and Asia could fall into poverty. A recent UK government report warned chocolate prices could also increase. Dry weather is fuelling massive wildfires in Indonesia, the second-largest grower of cacao. Ecuador, the fourth-largest grower, is expected to suffer heavy rainfall and flooding. But the most worrying threat is to rice, the primary staple for half the world’s population. El Niño reduced summer monsoon rainfall in India, the biggest producer, by 13 per cent. The harvest in some parts of central India failed completely as farmers were never able to transplant seedlings from nurseries to the desiccated paddy fields. Yield is expected to fall by 7 per cent, or 10 million tonnes. India is likely to restrict exports, according to Akshay Deoras at the University of Reading, UK, as it did during the 2023-24 El Niño, after which global prices shot up by 30 to 40 per cent. “Inflation is a big challenge over the next few months,” he says. Multiple points of failure Grocery chains in countries that import a large share of their food, including the UK, would typically try to buy rice from other providers. The problem is El Niño drought also threatens to wreck rice crops in Vietnam and Thailand, the next-largest exporters. In addition, dry weather is also starting to decimate wheat crops in India and Australia, both major producers. California and Mexico, which supply most of the US’s fruit and vegetables, face potentially damaging rainfall. In the case of “multiple breadbasket failure”, replacement supplies become difficult to find, and a staple can become brutally expensive or unavailable. While countries like China, Germany and India have built grain stores to buffer these shocks, the UK and the US haven’t. “With El Niño, you have these phenomena of changes in weather patterns across the whole globe, which is part of why it makes it so difficult,” says Monika Zurek at the University of Oxford. “You cannot easily substitute anymore.” The most vulnerable will be hit the hardest, since poorer families have to put a higher percentage of their income toward food, a relationship known as Engel’s law. Low-income Britons, who spend 70 per cent of their disposable income on meals, may be forced to buy lower-quality food. In lower-income countries, people can face food insecurity, which is defined as having access to fewer than 2500 calories a day. West Africa is at risk of hunger due to its reliance on imported rice, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. But the highest concern is southern and East Africa, where El Niño drought will be a “compounding shock” on top of existing problems like conflict. It could undermine sorghum and millet crops in Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan, which are already suffering some of the driest weather on record. In south-eastern African countries such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the crucial maize crop could wither. During the 2015-16 super El Niño, maize fields became piles of dry husks, cattle pastures were littered with bony carcasses and 36 million people in Africa faced hunger. It could be even worse this time, as foreign aid decreased by 23 per cent in 2025 and the US Agency for International Development was abolished. El Niño arrives as US-Iran tensions continue to choke diesel and fertiliser shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. A report by the think tank Safe Climate Australia argued that, in Asia, this combination could lead to “social unrest and conflict in vulnerable countries, much as the global wheat crisis became a trigger of the Arab Spring”. Deoras also thinks it is a risk. “If you have got increases in food and fuel prices, then the whole backlash is going to be against the local government,” he says. And all of this comes as humanity approaches what is almost certain to be the hottest year in its history. Though it is far too early for forecasts, many farmers and experts fear another sweltering, dry summer in 2027. Laines Organic Farm is installing tanks to collect rainwater and hopes for government funding to drill a well. “That’s what all the farmers are talking about after that hot summer. Everyone should have their own borehole,” says Farber. “The summer really wiped us out.”