The Pacific is running hot, and the forecasters are no longer hedging. In its diagnostic discussion of September 10, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center kept an El Niño Advisory in effect and put the odds of a very strong event through the Northern Hemisphere winter above 90 percent, with the Niño-3.4 sea-surface anomaly already near +1.8°C. What makes this one worth watching is where its weather lands.
Several agencies are pointing the same way. The Climate Prediction Center's model guidance centers the October–December anomaly close to +2.6°C, a level that would rank among the strongest events since 1950; Australia's Bureau of Meteorology logged +2.2°C in early August, and Japan's Meteorological Agency measured +2.5°C in July, tying its highest July reading since 1949, according to a forecast compilation by The Watchers.
Why Asia's weather is the world's price
Roughly 90 percent of the world's rice is grown and consumed in Asia, the Lowy Institute notes, which is why a dry monsoon in one hemisphere becomes a grocery bill in the other. The trade is concentrated as well: India is the largest exporter, shipping more rice than the next three suppliers combined, with Thailand and Vietnam next at about 15 and 14 percent of global exports, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Other staples cluster the same way — some 80 percent of the world's palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. When the weather turns against a handful of these producers at once, the shortfall has nowhere cheap to hide.
The exposure runs both ways. Many Southeast Asian economies are net food importers despite the region's output — Singapore brings in more than 90 percent of its food — so a bad season raises costs for the same countries whose farmers are struggling. That is the mechanism by which an Asian drought reaches a shopper in Lagos or São Paulo: not only through lost harvests, but through the trade policy that lost harvests tend to trigger.
What past El Niños did
The 1997–98 event was linked by the United Nations to more than 20,000 deaths and, by NASA's estimate, some $36 billion in infrastructure damage worldwide. The 2015–16 El Niño left between 60 million and 100 million people facing food insecurity, on the World Food Programme's assessment; in Indonesia, drought-fed fires burned around 2.6 million hectares and cost an estimated $16.1 billion, about 1.9 percent of GDP, the World Bank found, figures compiled by Anadolu Agency.
A drought becomes a global price shock less through lost harvests than through the export bans that lost harvests tend to trigger.
The most recent example needed no drought at all to move markets. When India restricted non-basmati white rice exports in July 2023, the benchmark Thai white rice price rose more than 20 percent within weeks and global rice prices climbed to a roughly 15-year high, the IFPRI and the FAO reported; Indian exports fell 34 percent over the following year. Yet 2023–24 is also the counter-example: despite ranking among the strongest events on record, it produced unusually mild weather effects in much of Asia. Strength alone does not dictate where the rain fails.
This year, on the ground
The early evidence in 2026 is mixed but leaning dry. In a June dispatch carried by Aaj English TV, Reuters reported drought across India's northwestern plains delaying the sowing of rice, pulses, sugarcane and corn, with a New Delhi trader saying conditions were "currently unfavourable for the timely sowing of summer crops." In Thailand's Chainat province, a rice farmer, Nerawat Oramah, told Reuters he was holding off on a second planting: "It's a risk for everyone." Parts of Java and Sumatra went more than ten days without meaningful rain.
The picture has since sharpened. In a September 16 report, FoodNavigator cited monsoon rainfall running about 13 percent below normal in India — down 46 percent in Andhra Pradesh and 63 percent in Telangana — and quoted CropGPT chief executive Rob Weston warning that the deficit "could reduce crops by over 20 percent" and that "food prices are bound to increase." Sugar has moved first: India halted most exports earlier this year, and raw sugar posted its strongest monthly gain since 2010 in August, the same report said.
What is not yet settled
How much of any single drought to attribute to El Niño remains an open question; the pattern loads the dice toward dry conditions across a corridor running from Pakistan and India through mainland Southeast Asia to Indonesia and the Philippines, as the FAO maps it, but it does not determine any one harvest. Policy is the amplifier to watch. The export restrictions that followed the 2023 shortfall show how quickly a national decision can become a global price event, and governments enter this season with those instruments already in hand. The FAO and World Food Programme have appealed for anticipatory support covering 8.8 million people across 22 high-risk countries. Whether 2026 becomes another 2015 or another mild year will be answered not by the forecast but by the harvest — and by how many exporting governments decide to keep their grain at home.