Grain Drain

A record El Niño and a closed Gulf are converging on next year’s harvests.

I have warned before, quietly, that food pressures bring down governments. A food shock reaches people months after its cause, because of the lag between harvest, processing and distribution, and by the time it arrives, governments squeezed by prices have few good options left. Sri Lanka showed how it ends. World food prices reached the highest level in the FAO’s records in March 2022, and by July, after months of fuel and food shortages, the country’s president had fled.

The same pattern is forming again, larger. Two shocks of a kind that arrive once in a generation are now bearing down on the same harvests. One is an El Niño that has just broken the instrumental record and is forecast to go much further. The other is a war that has kept the Strait of Hormuz all but closed since February.

The warmest water on record

El Niño is measured by how much warmer than normal the surface of the central Pacific runs, in a patch of ocean called the Niño 3.4 region. On 21 September that patch ran 3.11 °C above normal and broke the daily record of 3.08 °C, set in November 2015, according to Carbon Brief. In early September of 1997 and of 2015, the years of the two great El Niños of living memory, the same index stood at around 1.9 °C.

This event is still building. The forecast models project a monthly peak of about 4.1 °C between November and January, with 80 per cent of 674 model runs falling between 3.4 and 4.6 °C. Every one of those runs peaks above the 2015–16 record. NOAA’s September outlook gives a 75 per cent chance that, over October to December, this will be the strongest El Niño since 1950. That holds even on NOAA’s relative index, which discounts the background warming of the oceans. The weather arrives around the peak. The failed harvests arrive after it, which puts most of the damage in 2027.

A strait full of fertiliser

The United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February, and commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has barely moved since. A ceasefire in April did not reopen it. This month the war widened. Yemen’s Houthis seized Perim, the island in the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow strait at the southern mouth of the Red Sea, and on 11 September Saudi Arabia shut its East-West pipeline after drone attacks. That pipeline had been carrying Saudi crude across the peninsula to the Red Sea, around the blockade. Oil is back above $100 a barrel.

Oil makes the headlines, but for food the bigger story is fertiliser. In 2024 the Gulf economies supplied 24.8 per cent of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser exports and 11.4 per cent of its phosphate exports, and the World Trade Organization reports that shipments through the strait have stayed close to zero since the war began. Urea more than doubled in price, from around $400 a tonne to over $850 in April, then fell back to $453 in June.

Price is not the whole story, because the tonnes that stopped moving through the strait have not resumed. The WTO counts eighteen economies as acutely exposed. India bought almost two-thirds of its nitrogen fertiliser imports from the Gulf, and Thailand close to half. Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe are also on the list. Nitrogen fertiliser is made from natural gas, and the war has pushed up gas prices too, so even fertiliser made far from the Gulf costs more.

A farmer who could not find or afford fertiliser this spring harvests less this autumn. The gap shows up first in the yield, then in the stocks, and only then in the price. That lag means that most of what the strait has done to food has not yet reached anyone’s plate.

Where the weather bites

Much of El Niño’s damage will fall on the same countries. India’s monsoon ran about 14 per cent below normal nationally as of 7 September, and 27 per cent below in the southern peninsula. Pulses, coarse grains and oilseeds, which depend on rain rather than irrigation, have been the most exposed. India is the world’s largest rice exporter, and during the last El Niño, in July 2023, it banned most exports of non-basmati white rice to protect its own consumers.

Southern Africa plants its main maize crop in November and December, just as this El Niño peaks, and El Niño summers there usually mean drought. The last one, in 2024, led Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi to declare national disasters. Several of the countries on the WTO’s fertiliser list are in the same region, so they face a dry season and an expensive one at once.

Rice yields in Southeast Asia usually fall in El Niño years, and the World Bank notes that farmers in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand were already losing money to fertiliser and energy costs before the planting season. In Guatemala, fuel protests are colliding with an El Niño drought in the Dry Corridor.

Not everywhere loses. Australia’s winter crop is forecast to fall by 12 per cent, and it would still be the fourth largest on record. El Niño often brings good rains to Argentina’s pampas and the southern United States. The world will not run out of grain. The danger is in where the shortfalls land, who has to import to cover them, and whether they can pay.

The first dominoes

The most fragile places were already in trouble. In June the FAO and the World Food Programme warned that acute hunger would worsen in thirteen hotspots through November. Around 266 million people already face high levels of acute food insecurity, and there is a risk of famine in Sudan, South Sudan, Gaza and Somalia. Humanitarian funding has been cut deeply, and the agencies named El Niño as a likely aggravator before it had broken any records.

Revolt tends to follow the price of bread. In 2011, Marco Lagi, Karla Bertrand and Yaneer Bar-Yam showed that the food riots of 2008 and the uprisings of the Arab Spring both broke out when global food prices peaked. In Egypt, grain prices had pushed up the price of bread by about 37 per cent in the years before Tahrir Square.

The protests have already begun, and so far they are about fuel. On 13 September Syria saw its most widespread demonstrations since the fall of Assad, in six of its fourteen governorates, after the government raised fuel prices. There have been protests and strikes in Guatemala, the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and clashes in France.

Fuel moves first because a higher oil price reaches the pump within days. Food follows at the speed of the growing season.

Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer, has reinstated price controls on unsubsidised bread and raised fuel prices by 17 per cent, and in May its government was reported to be considering an end to the in-kind bread subsidy. I suspect the deeper danger lies in the Gulf itself. For years the Gulf states have propped up governments in the region, and their economies employ millions of workers from Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines, whose remittances keep families fed at home. A war that strains the Gulf weakens that support just when it is most needed.

In 2011 the price shock was global but the political tinder was concentrated in one region. This time the energy shock has reached every importing country at once, and the tinder is spread across much of the global South: young, urban, indebted populations whose governments cannot afford to subsidise their way out. A global Arab Spring, with unrest on the 2011 pattern breaking out on several continents in 2027, is a real possibility. Governments facing bread queues are tempted to find an enemy abroad. In a region already at war, that temptation is the most dangerous of all.

Hidden hunger

The deepest harm may be the least visible. When food prices climb, poor households hold on to their staples and cut back on the foods that carry vitamins, minerals and protein: vegetables, pulses, eggs, milk and meat. Calories hold up for longer than nutrition does. A shortfall of starch makes headlines, while a shortfall of micronutrients stunts children for the rest of their lives and rarely makes the news.

What this does not show

A durable ceasefire could reopen the strait within weeks, although April’s did not. El Niño forecasts at this range are good but not perfect. Part of this record also reflects an ocean that is warmer overall. On NOAA’s relative index, which subtracts that background warming, this event was still below 1982’s peak in mid-September, which is why NOAA gives odds rather than a certainty. Carbon Brief notes that the index can understate an event as broad as this one. Fertiliser prices have already fallen back once this year, and could do so again. None of this is fate. A food crisis is a crisis of price and distribution before it is a crisis of production, which means the choices governments make over the next six months will matter a great deal.

What helps

For nations, 2008 and 2022 have already taught the main lessons. Export bans spread panic from one market to the next, so grain should be kept moving. Food and cash sent ahead of a drought go much further than famine relief sent after it. Scarce fertiliser should go where it raises yields most, and legumes, which fix their own nitrogen, deserve a larger place in rotations.

Households can do the same on a small scale. The more self-sufficient we can be in critical resources, as individuals and as nations, the better insulated we are from global tail risks. If you can, grow a little patch of greens, beans and potatoes, and perhaps keep a few hens. Set aside a modest amount of extra non-perishables on each shopping trip. Keep it modest, because hoarding is how shortages begin.

The more we can ease the pressure on our own families’ food, the more we help everyone else on this planet by extension.