India, Southeast Asia and parts of eastern Australia, along with northern South Africa, will experience drought later this year, but just as predictable as that is no one really knows how serious it will be. Some El Niño events are more serious than others.
The most adverse part of the aggressively developing El Niño event is still a few months away. However, there are some weather anomalies already prevalent, and they are likely to continue as we march toward the peak of El Niño. Most of the anomalous weather underway is a wetter bias and not a dry one. Southern China is already too wet and vulnerable to significant flooding in the next few weeks. Southern Brazil is also quite wet and expected to stay wetter than usual through the end of this year.
Portions of North America will be on the same bandwagon before long. Flooding has been noted in Canada’s Prairies, and there will be more of that during the next few weeks. Portions of the United States have seen rainfall ramp up in recent weeks, with serious flooding in parts of Missouri and some neighboring states. Other areas in the United States are seeing drought whittled down by increasing rainfall. This process will continue at least until autumn and winter, when Canada will trend drier and warmer than usual and the southern United States becomes the wet spot in the continent.
Flooding in the late autumn and winter of 2026-27 should impact parts of California and eventually the southeastern United States. Today, drought remains in the southeastern states, even though there have been a few bouts of timely rain improving crop conditions. A tropical disturbance, of sorts, recently impacted Texas, Louisiana and the Delta, producing excessive rain. The rains may be a foreshadow of what should evolve in at least a part of the southeastern United States in the late autumn and winter of 2026-27.
Another area that will experience excessive rainfall later this year is east-central Africa. That area produces coffee, rice, sugar cane and a number of other crops that may struggle to succeed because of flooding rain that likely will evolve in a few months.
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El Niño events usually bring more moisture to the middle latitudes, and that is the primary reason that large-scale droughts are typically rare in key grain and traditional oilseed production areas around the world during such events. It is La Niña that threatens key grain and oilseed belts around the world.
As of this writing, there were very few areas in the world that have seen enough adverse weather recently to suffer a serious threat to production potentials. In the Southern Hemisphere, rain in Australia’s wheat, barley and canola production areas has been more than sufficient to eliminate summer drought, except in a part of Queensland and northeastern New South Wales.
Similarly, South Africa has seen some well-timed rainfall, allowing its winter crops to go into the ground quite favorably.
Argentina is not to be left out of this good weather trend. Its wheat planting is moving along quite well, and the same is true for its barley and rapeseed crops, all of which are benefiting from well-timed rainfall and favorable soil moisture.
Brazil’s wheat areas are trending progressively wetter, along with some of its southern Safrinha corn production region. These areas are likely to see periodic bouts of well-above-normal rainfall through the balance of 2026, and when spring arrives, there is a relatively high potential that planting of rice, corn, soybeans and dry beans may fall behind the normal pace because of wet and muddy fields. Flooding is a likely potential.
South Africa and Australia winter crops may be well-established this year, but when spring arrives, the wrath of El Niño could stress these crops right at the time of reproduction, cutting into yields. The greater production impact, though, typically will be on summer crops, which will have to contend with hotter- and drier-than-usual conditions during much of the growing season. Southern Brazil will not likely have that same problem with dryness, but northeastern Brazil may.
In the meantime, statistics suggest that southern Brazil will contend with frequent bouts of wet weather for nearly as long as El Niño is in its development mode, and the same is true for southern China. Rounds of flooding in these areas may cut into production. In China, the impact is likely to be greatest on rice and sugar cane, where too much moisture will cause damage to both crops.
Rice damage from too much rain in China might not be a huge issue, but while it is raining too much there, it is likely to be drier than usual in the rice areas of southern Asia, from India to the Philippines and Indonesia. Some sugar cane and other crops will be impacted as well. If it rains too much in southern Brazil, its rice production also may be impacted.
The biggest concern from a drought perspective comes from India, where an El Niño-driven drought has not occurred since 2015 and 2016 and the last major El Niño drought was in 2010, when rainfall was nearly 22% below normal nationwide. The population in India is much larger than it was in 2010, and a serious drought could have huge implications.
Again, no one knows how significant this El Niño will be from an agricultural perspective. There have been many El Niño events in the past, and most of those have not had huge implications of worldwide food shortages. But local economies have been wrecked when significant weather anomalies impact production.
The biggest run-ups on commodity futures prices for traditional grains and oilseeds (wheat, barley, corn, soybeans and canola) have occurred in multi-year La Niña events and not “super” El Niño events. Those La Niña-related run-ups on commodity futures prices tend to occur for two to three years after the solar minimum, and we are at the wrong end of the solar cycle right now — just two years after the solar maximum.
A short-term scare in the futures markets is certainly a potential later in 2026 or in early 2027 because of El Niño-driven weather anomalies. But if weather and the solar cycle have anything to say about it, traditional grains and oilseeds likely will not be as seriously impacted as perhaps some rice, coffee, sugar cane and cocoa production.
Every El Niño event is different, so spinning the roulette wheel might give you a better prediction than this meteorologist can provide. It will be an interesting year — perhaps from a psychological perspective rather than an economic one.
