A farmer in the Mekong Delta tends the same rice variety his family has grown for generations. A thousand kilometres away, a cacao grower in Indonesia watches the sky for rain that isn't coming. In Iowa, a corn farmer notes with cautious relief that the forecast looks cooler and wetter than last year. They have never met. They are all living inside the same weather event.
El Niño doesn't discriminate by geography — but it does choose sides. When the Pacific warms past a certain threshold, it remakes the world's weather in a pattern that is, at this point, fairly well understood. What makes the 2026–27 event different is the scale: climate scientists are watching a warming so fast, so large, and arriving so early that the word "super" may still be underselling it.
This is a brief tour of what that means for the crops that ingredient buyers around the world depend on — and why Southeast Asia, more than anywhere else, is the place to watch.
How El Niño remakes the world's weather
"The projected El Niño is likely to yield asymmetric impacts — drought-like conditions reducing rice, maize and wheat in Asia and Australia, while wet conditions boost soybean production in the Americas."
— Observer Research Foundation Middle East · May 2026The mechanism is deceptively simple. When the eastern Pacific warms, it disrupts the Walker Circulation — the great atmospheric conveyor belt that normally moves moisture from South America toward Asia. The trade winds weaken. Warm water pools in the wrong place. And the downstream effects cascade across the planet with a logic that is consistent enough to plan around, but variable enough to keep everyone guessing about severity.
The broad pattern in strong El Niño years: drought and heat in South and Southeast Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa. Heavier rainfall and cooler summers in the Americas. Global rice, wheat, and maize yields tend to fall. Soybean yields tend to rise. El Niño reduces global rice yields on average by 1.33% — a number that sounds small until you understand that rice is the primary food source for more than 3.5 billion people, and that global rice stocks were already running below their five-year averages heading into 2026.
A super El Niño doesn't just accelerate these tendencies. It amplifies them into a different order of magnitude. The 2015–16 Godzilla event affected 60 million people globally, cost billions in agricultural losses, and contributed to a 16% increase in global rice prices. The current event is shaping up to potentially exceed it.
Southeast Asia: the world's rice bowl under heat and drought
Ninety percent of the world's rice is grown and eaten in Asia. A disproportionate share of the surplus that feeds everyone else — the exportable rice that becomes traded commodity, processed ingredient, and global food supply — comes from a handful of countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Myanmar.
Every single one of them is on the wrong side of El Niño.
When El Niño arrives in the Pacific, it pulls moisture away from Southeast Asia. Monsoons weaken or arrive late. Temperatures climb above the thresholds that rice can tolerate. The International Rice Research Institute has found that for every 1°C increase in average night-time temperatures during the dry season, rice yields fall by around 10% on average. In a super El Niño year, night-time temperatures routinely run 2–3°C above normal across the region for months at a time.
The 2015–16 Godzilla El Niño is the clearest template for what's coming. Across Southeast Asia, the warmer temperatures and prolonged drought resulted in a decline of 15 million tonnes of rice compared to the preceding two years — one of the largest single-event losses in modern agricultural history.
In Vietnam, the drought drove saltwater intrusion 90 kilometres into the Mekong Delta, poisoning fields. The economic losses hit $674 million, equal to 0.35% of the country's GDP. In the Philippines, close to 200,000 rice and corn farmers were affected. Rice production fell 11%. Riots followed in some areas. In Cambodia, 2.5 million people were affected by drought and crop failure. Estimated losses across all seven major Southeast Asian agricultural economies exceeded $1.4 billion — and that was just one season.
The numbers from individual countries tell the story more vividly than any average:
Beyond rice, the same drought conditions hit palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia — the world's two largest producers. Robusta coffee in Vietnam, Indonesia, and India faced heat stress that reduced yields significantly. Sugarcane in Thailand and India contracted. When El Niño hits Southeast Asia, it doesn't pick one crop. It lands on all of them at once.
The rest of the world: a mixed ledger
Outside Southeast Asia and South Asia, the El Niño story is genuinely more complicated — not uniformly bad, and in some places actively good.
South America tends to benefit from El Niño's wetter conditions across key growing regions. Brazilian and Argentine soybean harvests typically improve, with global-mean soybean yields rising 2–5% during El Niño events. This matters for food ingredient buyers because soybeans are a critical source of lecithin, soy protein, and oil — supply that tightens when Asian sources weaken. A good South American soy crop in 2026 provides a partial offset to rice and palm oil supply pressure from Asia.
Australia sits on the same side of the ledger as Southeast Asia. El Niño brings drier conditions to eastern Australia — the key wheat and grain production belt. Australian wheat exports, which flow heavily toward Asia, are expected to come under pressure. When both Asian crop production and Australian supply contract simultaneously, the import-dependent countries of the Middle East and North Africa face a double squeeze.
East Africa is one of the few regions that can see genuine benefit — El Niño typically brings above-normal rainfall to countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania during the short rains season. But the relationship is inconsistent, and the same rains that help crops can trigger floods and infrastructure damage that undermines food distribution.
El Niño doesn't arrive in 2026 in isolation. Fertilizer supply routes through the Strait of Hormuz are already disrupted by the Iran conflict, driving urea and phosphorus prices sharply higher. El Niño's drought reduces water availability for irrigation. Lower irrigation water plus reduced fertilizer application plus heat stress creates a compounding effect that amplifies crop losses well beyond what pure weather models would predict.
Indonesia, Malaysia, and India — already carrying the largest agricultural exposure to El Niño in Southeast and South Asia — also accumulate the largest fertilizer dependency risk. These are not separate problems. They are the same problem arriving in waves.
India deserves its own paragraph. With 1.4 billion people and a food production system built around the June–September monsoon, a major El Niño event — particularly one that suppresses the summer monsoon for the first time in three years — carries systemic risk. India's wheat, rice, pulses, and sugarcane are all exposed. India's policy response will also shape global prices: the 2023 non-Basmati export ban, triggered partly by El Niño fears, raised global rice prices by 30%. If India restricts exports again in late 2026 in response to a weak monsoon, the effect on global ingredient supply chains would be immediate.
What it all adds up to for ingredient buyers
The ingredients most concentrated in El Niño's firing line share a common geography: they come from the places that take the hardest hit. Rice-derived ingredients from Pakistan, India, Vietnam, and Thailand. Palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia. Robusta-based extracts and coatings from Vietnam and Indonesia. Tapioca starch from Thailand. Cane sugar from India and Thailand. All of these sit directly in the drought zone.
The ingredients that benefit — or at least don't face supply pressure — are the ones grown on the other side of the world: US corn-derived glucose and maltodextrin, South American soy lecithin and protein, European beet sugar.
What this creates, in practical terms, is a supply landscape where Asian-origin ingredients tighten while American-origin alternatives loosen. For buyers who have built their supply chains around Asian origins — because of price, quality, or long-standing supplier relationships — the coming 18 months present a window to both hedge existing positions and, where formulations allow, run qualification trials on Western alternatives before a supply crisis forces the conversation.
And then comes 2027
Every strong El Niño plants the seed of what follows. La Niña — the cold phase that typically arrives 12 to 18 months after El Niño peaks — tends to bring above-normal rainfall back to Southeast Asia and South Asia. That sounds like relief, and often it is. But in the immediate aftermath of a super El Niño, when reservoirs are depleted, soils are cracked, and farmers have already taken losses on one or two seasons, the "relief rains" can arrive too fast for damaged land to absorb. Flooding follows drought. The agricultural calendar gets compressed and distorted. Recovery takes longer than the models suggest.
Climate scientists are already saying that 2027 is on track to be the hottest year ever recorded, as the accumulated heat from the 2026 super El Niño continues to influence global temperatures even as the Pacific cools. That sustained heat background means even a "normal" 2027 agricultural year in Southeast Asia won't feel normal to the farmers who lived through 2026.
For ingredient buyers, this is the argument for a two-year planning horizon rather than a one-year one. The 2026 El Niño is the acute event. The 2027 La Niña rebound and the prolonged heat backdrop are the chronic condition. The supply chain disruptions that begin this year may not fully resolve until 2028 or beyond.