An impending El Niño foreshadows a new shake-up for global food production

Chances of an El Niño global climate event occurring this year have grown swiftly, potentially impacting food production from the Americas to Africa and southern Asia. The US Climate Prediction Center (CPC) currently gives El Niño a 62% chance of developing between May and July this year. For the period from July to September, there is an 80% chance of El Niño setting in — a big jump from the 56% probability that the CPC predicted last month. An El Niño event would follow a rare, three consecutive years of La Niña, which has many of the opposite effects to El Niño on agricultural crop growing conditions. Currently, the CPC says the globe’s climate is in a period of ENSO Neutral, meaning an absence of either La Niña or El Niño. El Niño affects food production differently around the world. In the US, previous El Niño years have been linked with some of the most successful US corn and soybean crops, as favorable summer growing conditions prevailed in the Corn Belt. In 2015, when the ...