The dust in the fields carries a different weight this year. You feel it in the reports landing on desks from London to Brussels, the ones that lay out numbers cold as spent brass: a super El Niño building across the Pacific with better than even odds of turning savage. Goldman Sachs analysts put the likely surge in global food commodity prices at 15.8 percent. The ripple reaches the eurozone with a 1.3 percent lift in food costs. None of it ends cleanly. They reckon the full consequences will drag on until the second half of 2028.
I have watched these patterns before, the way warm water shifts and the sky answers with absence or deluge. Historical super events in 1972-73, 1982-83 and 1997-98 left droughts and floods that rewrote harvest tables for years. The World Meteorological Organization and NOAA have already signalled over 60 percent probability of a strong event taking hold in 2026. This time the margins are thinner. UniCredit analysts warn the food system enters the second half of 2026 with little margin for error. Their modelling shows an extreme scenario delivering a 14.3 percent hit to global agricultural production, some $342 billion in lost output at current prices. Risilience reaches the same grim figure.
El Niño puts ‘climateflation’ back on the agenda.
That line from the UniCredit note lands heavier when you remember the Iran conflict has already pushed energy and fertiliser costs higher, tightening the same supply chains now asked to absorb weather shock. Price spikes could run 10 to 50 percent across core commodities. Rice, palm oil, sugar and coffee sit in the crosshairs, vulnerable to jumps of 50 to 100 percent or worse. In India the monsoon has turned miserly. Some regions see only 25 percent of normal rainfall, central pockets manage 50. Wheat, rice and sugar cane supplies tighten before the grain even reaches port.
The cost of distance
Britain and the wider West have spent decades betting on the efficiency of global flows. Cheap imports masked the erosion of domestic capacity. Open borders swelled demand while energy policy left fertiliser prices hostage to foreign fields and unstable regimes. When the Pacific warms and the monsoons fail, those choices stop looking like sophistication. They look like exposure.
Entrepreneurs on British farms have shown what targeted innovation can do, breeding varieties that shrug off drought, refining precision techniques that stretch every litre of water. Markets reward that agility when governments step back from layering regulation upon regulation. Yet the instinct in Brussels and Westminster too often runs the other way: more targets, more transfers, more faith in multilateral weather forecasts dressed up as policy. The institutions issuing the warnings cannot summon rain or rebuild soil. Sovereign control of resources and resilient home production can.
The coming shock will not punish equally. Import-dependent nations will feel it first and hardest. Lower-income regions already walk closer to the edge. For Western capitals the test is simpler. Will we treat this as another excuse to tighten the regulatory noose and lecture about net zero, or will we quietly strengthen what we can control: seed banks, upland pastures, trade deals that favour reliable partners over ideological ones?
