Food for Thought Leadership - Could Super El Niño Send Food Prices Higher?

Hi, everybody.

It's Chris Campbell, Vice President of Content and Insights here at the Food Institute, and welcome to another episode of Food for Thought Leadership.

This week, we have Brittany Borer, Food Institute's favorite meteorologist turned food reporter, and we're going to be talking about a great and interesting topic, and that is the Super El Nino.

Before we start talking about it, though, I did want to get a little bit of a baseline here.

Part of the reason why we want to speak about it is because we do expect there's going to be some major agricultural impacts.

And just this week, we've seen a bunch of information coming out, including the World Food Program, estimating that 49 million people could go into acute hunger because of the Super El Nino.

Prior reports from JP Morgan showing that 0.7 percentage point increase in food inflation could be possible due to the Super El Nino.

And even this week, Maximo Torero, the chief economist with UN's FAO, is also noting that we're expecting some increased inflation at the end of this year and really into 2027.

So taking a look at all these stats, I think it's really important to keep an eye on what is happening here with this global weather pattern.

But when we were talking about it on the morning meeting, it kind of became apparent to us that we're not entirely sure what a Super El Nino really is.

So Brittany, I was really hoping we could start off here today.

Can you tell us what a Super El Nino is and maybe give us a little bit of information that would distinguish it from a regular El Nino cycle and maybe some of the major things that meteorologists are keeping an eye on that are telling them that this event could be coming?