Every summer, a rice farmer in Sindh watches the sky the same way his grandfather did — waiting for the monsoon. Too little rain and the crop withers. Too much and the fields drown. What he can't see from his field is that the thing deciding his fate isn't the clouds overhead. It's a patch of ocean ten thousand kilometers away.
That patch is the equatorial Pacific. When it warms — a phenomenon called El Niño — it reshapes weather across the entire planet. South Asia's monsoon gets weaker, later, or in the cruelest years, it swings between drought and catastrophic flooding with barely a pause between. For Pakistan, which grows rice on 3 million hectares and earns nearly $4 billion a year exporting it, there is no more consequential event in nature.
Right now, that ocean is warming faster than usual. Climate scientists at NOAA and the World Meteorological Organization are watching it closely. What they're seeing has them issuing some of the strongest forecasts in years.
The forecast, in plain language
"After a period of neutral conditions, climate models are now strongly aligned — there is high confidence in the onset of El Niño, followed by further intensification."
— Wilfran Moufouma Okia, Chief of Climate Prediction, WMO · May 2026NOAA has placed the Pacific on El Niño Watch. There is an 82% chance El Niño conditions arrive between May and July 2026, and a 96% chance they persist through the winter of 2026–27. That much is nearly certain. The debate is about how powerful it gets.
There have only been four "super" El Niños since 1950 — events where the Pacific runs more than 2°C above its normal temperature. The last one, in 2015–16, became known as the "Godzilla" event. It disrupted agriculture on six continents. The European forecasting agency ECMWF is currently projecting that the Pacific could reach 3°C above average by November 2026 — which would put this in historically unprecedented territory.
The current probability of a super event is around 35%. That's roughly a one-in-three chance. Low enough to hope it doesn't happen. High enough that anyone who buys rice ingredients for a living should be paying close attention.
What El Niño actually does to Pakistan
Here's the part that surprises most people: El Niño doesn't just mean drought in Pakistan. Sometimes it means catastrophic flooding. Both have happened within living memory, often with very little warning.
The classic El Niño effect suppresses the summer monsoon across South Asia. Pakistan gets 65% of its annual rainfall in June through September — the same window when rice is growing in the fields. When El Niño weakens that monsoon by 20 or 30%, yields fall, farmers struggle, and the ingredient supply chain feels it months later in higher prices and tighter availability.
But there's a second pathway that's actually more dangerous. Pakistan sits at the end of one of the world's largest glacier systems — over 13,000 glaciers in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush. When temperatures climb, those glaciers melt faster, pouring water into rivers that are already swollen from monsoon rain. The result can be flooding that has nothing to do with whether the monsoon was weak or strong.
El Niño typically suppresses South Asia's monsoon — but for Pakistan, it can also trigger flooding through accelerated glacial melt and disrupted weather patterns. The 2022 floods, which destroyed 80% of Sindh's rice crop, happened after years of La Niña — the opposite of El Niño. The lesson: both extremes are dangerous, and a super El Niño often plants the seeds of a catastrophic rebound one to two years later.
This is what makes the 2026–27 outlook so consequential. The drought and heat stress risk arrives with El Niño itself — during the 2026 Kharif season. But the flood risk follows behind it, as La Niña conditions often develop 12 to 18 months after a major El Niño peaks, creating the next season's disaster just as the first one is being absorbed.
What history tells us
Pakistan has been through this before. The record is sobering — but also instructive. Good years and bad years don't arrive randomly. They cluster around the state of that Pacific ocean.
The 2022 season stands as a warning that shouldn't be forgotten. Floods inundated 57% of Sindh's farmland. Rice production in the province fell by 80%. Pakistan's national output dropped from a record 9.3 million tonnes to 6 million — a loss of roughly a third of the crop in a single monsoon. Thirty-three million people were affected.
The year before that, 2021, had been a record harvest. The swing between those two years — from the best crop in Pakistan's history to one of the worst — happened in twelve months. That is the nature of what we're dealing with.
What the 2026 season might look like
There is no single answer to what a 2026 Kharif season looks like — it depends on how powerful El Niño becomes and what it does to Pakistan's weather. Here are four honest scenarios, built from the historical record and current forecasts. The probability weights come from NOAA's strength forecast.
One thing is worth holding on to. Even in the most optimistic 2026 scenario — a weak El Niño — Pakistan's output will likely fall short of recent peaks. The 2025 floods left behind real damage: impaired canals, reduced seed stocks, farmers carrying debt. This season begins from a weaker starting point than any ENSO equivalent a few years ago.
Why this matters for rice ingredients
For the people who buy rice syrups, maltodextrins, and starches for food manufacturing, the connection from a Pacific ocean temperature to their supply chain runs in a straight line — but it's easy to miss until it's too late.
When Pakistan's paddy crop shrinks, the raw material for rice derivatives gets expensive and scarce fast. Ingredient manufacturers face a double squeeze: less volume available and higher prices for what's left. For highly processed derivatives like rice syrup and maltodextrin, quality also degrades when grain is heat-stressed — lower starch content per tonne, harder to convert efficiently.
The tighter the global supply, the worse it gets. India — the world's largest rice exporter — imposed export restrictions in July 2023 when its own El Niño fears mounted. Global rice prices jumped 30% in response. If a super El Niño simultaneously stresses production across Pakistan, India, and Southeast Asia, that kind of export restriction could return, with compounding effects.
The window to act, whether that means forward contracts, pre-positioning inventory, or qualifying alternative ingredient origins, is in the next few months — before monsoon performance data arrives in August and prices have already moved.