UK farms hit by record heat brace for a wet, stormy El Niño winter

The damage on the West Sussex farm so far comes from the summer. Record heat and widespread drought killed some carrot seeds and left the survivors more room to grow ^[1]. When the rain came back, warm for the season, some carrots split down the side and whiteflies gathered under the leaves ^[2]. "If the crops are stressed, they're more likely to get attacked," said Tom Chadwick, who grows vegetables and fruit at Laines Organic Farm with his partner Rosa Farber ^[3][4]. All of this came before the El Niño weather it is meant to foreshadow, which is forecast to be warm, wet and stormy for the UK this autumn and winter ^[5].

The nearest yardstick is the previous El Niño, which brought England and Wales their wettest six months ever observed ^[9]. New Scientist says it was a far smaller El Niño than the current one ^[11], though that alone does not show a bigger one will bring proportionally more rain to England. The harvest loss runs through waterlogging: soaked soils can stop tractors reaching the fields or keep seeds from germinating ^[12].

New Scientist's report describes a record super El Niño whose extreme weather will hit every continent ^[14]. The widest exposure is rice, the primary staple for half the world's population, with India the biggest producer ^[16]. The monsoon shortfall has already happened ^[17], and the yield loss is forecast at 7 per cent, or 10 million tonnes ^[19]. If both figures describe the same base, they imply a crop of roughly 143 million tonnes ^[30].

Akshay Deoras at the University of Reading said: "Inflation is a big challenge over the next few months" ^[21]. His basis is the last El Niño. The weather and India's export policy changed together in 2023-24, and global prices rose after both ^[20]. It is not clear how much of that rise came from the drought and how much from the export curbs.

Importing countries, the UK among them, would usually buy rice from other providers. The difficulty is that El Niño drought also threatens the crops of Vietnam and Thailand, the next-largest exporters ^[22]. In our view this is the link that could turn a regional drought into a world price event, because the usual remedy for a short harvest shares the same weather. That depends on the Vietnamese and Thai losses materialising, and the report describes them as a threat.

Coffee and cocoa follow a similar pattern with different geography. Almost all recent El Niños have brought drought to Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia, the top four coffee producers ^[23]. Consumers in Europe might cut back on coffee breaks, while bean growers in South America and Asia could fall into poverty ^[25]. Dry weather is feeding wildfires in Indonesia, the second-largest cacao grower, and Ecuador, the fourth-largest, is expected to get heavy rain and flooding ^[26]. A UK government report warned that chocolate prices could rise ^[27]. Wheat is next: the report says dry weather has begun to ravage the crop in India and Australia, two of its major producers ^[28].

"The UK may be willing to pay top dollar," said Christian Jaccarini at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a UK non-profit. "It doesn't mean people won't go hungry somewhere else." ^[29]