Scorched Harvest: The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast, the Crops in Its Path, and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind

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Scorched Harvest: The Strongest El Niño Ever Forecast, the Crops in Its Path, and the Hunger It Will Leave Behind<br>How 3.6 degrees of warm water in the tropical Pacific is about to redraw the map of global hunger and why, this time, no one in power can claim they were not warned.

Mark Roberts<br>Jul 18, 2026

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The Ocean That Puts Food on the Table

The July forecast runs are in, and they describe something no working forecaster has ever seen. According to 667 ensemble members from 14 seasonal prediction systems, the multi-model median now puts this winter’s El Niño at a peak of 3.6°C in the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific. This is roughly 0.8°C beyond the strongest El Niño event in a century and a half of observation. ¹ Ninety-one percent of the ensemble members predicted that this El Niño will exceed the all-time record. The ocean itself is not waiting for the models: daily sea surface temperatures in the region are already running around 2°C above their era-adjusted average in mid-July, warmer at this date than in 1997 or 2015, the two most explosive El Niño onsets ever measured, and by a margin that is not close. ²

The onset race: daily sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region for 2026, against 1997 and 2015, the two most explosive El Niño onsets previously measured. The dashed line is the multi-model forecast median; the shading spans the middle 80 percent of the 667-member ensemble.<br>4Hunger.org is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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The temptation will be to file this under meteorology. File it instead under food, and under hunger.<br>An El Niño is not a storm. It does not arrive with wind and fury and then recede. It is a reorganization of where rain falls on Earth, a slow, hemisphere-spanning transfer of moisture away from the croplands of Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Central America, and northeastern Brazil, and toward places that cannot use the rain to produce food such as the open Pacific, the deserts of coastal Peru, the flood plains of the Horn of Africa. The warm water is only the mechanism; the failed harvests are what people will actually live through. Since the global food system runs on a handful of staple crops grown in a handful of climate-exposed regions, a sufficiently large El Niño is not a weather anomaly at all. It is going to be a global food shock on a twelve-month fuse. ³<br>“An El Niño does not destroy one harvest in one place. It reorganizes the rain over half the planet, on a schedule the world’s croplands were never meant to adapt to.”<br>4Hunger.org has spent the past several months documenting the two crises already squeezing the food system: the fertilizer supply shock that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in February (see Fertilizer Famine), and the two-year drought that has driven the American cattle herd to its smallest size since 1951 and the U.S. wheat crop to its smallest since 1972 (see Parched Ground). The forecast now on the table is the third shock, and it is aimed squarely at the harvests of the next eighteen months all around the world.<br>A Map of What Comes Next

Strong El Niños do not damage the world’s agriculture randomly. They damage it in a pattern that has been documented across 150 years of El Niño events, and the pattern is brutally consistent. ⁴ To understand the geography of what is now forecast, start with where previous events did their damage, because they do it in the same places again and again.<br>Indonesia, the Philippines, and mainland Southeast Asia sit first in the line of fire, and the impacts are already arriving there. Strong El Niños suppress the rains across the Maritime Continent. Rice planting is delayed, reservoir levels fall, and the drained peatlands of Sumatra and Kalimantan become tinder: the 1997–98 El Niño event burned millions of hectares of Indonesian forest and peat and forced the largest rice imports in the country’s history. ⁵ Indonesia and the Philippines are, respectively, the world’s first- and second-largest rice importers in a bad year. Their bad year has already started.<br>India’s southwest monsoon which is the single most important weather system for human food security on Earth, watering the kharif rice, pulse, and oilseed crops on which 1.4 billion people depend is statistically reduced in strong El Niño years. The relationship is probabilistic, not mechanical; monsoons have defied El Niños before. But the monsoon now underway is running against the strongest Pacific heat forcing ever forecast, and the last time an El Niño of merely ordinary strength developed, in 2023, India’s response to a modest monsoon shortfall was to ban the export of non-basmati rice within weeks which sent shockwaves through the global rice supply. ⁶ India alone...