El Niño 2026–27
El Niño could raise your grocery bill.
Discover how a warmer Pacific Ocean could affect your groceries.
Explore your groceriesEl Niño is a natural climate pattern. Warmer water in the tropical Pacific changes winds and rainfall around the world.
Learn more at NOAADrag to spin · tap any place
The Pacific has a fever.
Is this climate change?
No. El Niño is a natural pattern that comes and goes every few years. Climate change doesn't cause it.
But it now plays out in a warmer world. The whole ocean starts from a higher temperature, which is why the water reaches temperatures never measured before. And a warmer world can make the droughts and downpours that come with El Niño more extreme (KNMI).
Your groceries connect you to a warmer world.
Explore where everyday ingredients grow and how their world market prices are changing.
Why a world price isn't a shop price
The prices here are for the raw crop on the world market, in US dollars, from the World Bank. They are the same whichever place you look from. We have no shop-price data for any country.
What you pay in a shop is mostly making, shipping, packaging and selling. Shops and brands also buy months ahead, so a change in the world price reaches the shelf later, and only in part. Prices also move because of harvests elsewhere, energy, fertilizer, exchange rates, war and trade rules. El Niño is one reason, not the only one.
El Niño peaks first. Food shortages can follow.
In vulnerable regions, food aid needs may peak months after El Niño.
Forecasts for the places named, by NOAA CPC (the ocean) and FEWS NET (Oct 6, 2026), the famine early-warning network. They are not a forecast for supermarkets in Europe. Tap a row to see that region.