With geopolitical tensions simmering and this round of El Niño making its presence felt, the world is teetering on the edge of another food inflation spike. A recent JPMorgan report warns that five big pressure points—war, weather, storage, water, and waste—are converging to set the stage for the next global food crisis.
The team led by Nora Szentivanyi, JPMorgan’s senior global economist based in London, projects that turbulence around the Strait of Hormuz and a potential “super El Niño” could drive up fertilizer and food prices, pushing global food inflation from 2.8% in the first half of 2026 to 5% by the same period in 2027.
The report also flags that emerging markets will bear the brunt, especially South and Southeast Asia, West Africa, and parts of East and Southern Africa. Countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia, and South Korea have agriculture that’s highly sensitive to weather swings, and food carries a heavy weight in their consumer baskets.
Echoing that sentiment, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization chief economist Torero said last week that global commodity prices are poised to climb further. If the Iran conflict drags on, up to 19 million more people could fall into chronic hunger by 2030, with Asia and Africa hit hardest.
Meanwhile, the rapidly intensifying El Niño is piling on extra pressure, making global food insecurity worse from multiple angles.
El Niño is a climate phenomenon marked by unusual warming of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. It’s the flip side of La Niña, typically striking every 2 to 7 years and lasting 9 to 12 months. It throws global atmospheric circulation out of whack, triggering freak weather in different regions, with major knock-on effects for agriculture, ecosystems, and daily life.
Based in Rome, Italy, the World Food Programme estimates that this El Niño event could push nearly 49 million more people into acute food insecurity, lifting the global total to 274 million. Central America and southern Africa are the hardest-hit zones.
El Niño also tends to bring prolonged droughts to Australia and Southeast Asia, while southern South America and the southern U.S.—key food-producing regions—face more frequent flooding. That directly wreaks havoc on staple crops like corn and rice, as well as cash crops like cocoa.
FAO data shows that in April this year, the global food price index rose 1.6% month-on-month and 2.0% year-on-year, marking three straight months of gains and hitting a multi-year high not seen in nearly four years.
Industry insiders like Torero and JPMorgan anticipate that it typically takes 3 to 6 months for commodity price shifts to trickle down to retail food prices. That means end-consumer food prices will start climbing noticeably by late 2026, with the pace accelerating into 2027. Goldman Sachs, for its part, predicts cumulative global food price gains of 15.8% by 2028.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict, which erupted over four years ago, lit the fuse on a global food price crisis through supply shocks, transport snarls, and market expectations. Before the war, Russia and Ukraine together accounted for nearly a third of global wheat exports, and Ukraine supplied over half of the world’s sunflower oil. Russia also ranked as the largest nitrogen fertilizer exporter and the second-largest exporter of both potash and phosphate.
Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure have further squeezed Russian diesel and natural gas exports. Both are critical inputs in food production—natural gas is the backbone of nitrogen fertilizer manufacturing, whilefarm machinery, cross-border grain transport vehicles, and cold-chain storage equipment all run heavily on diesel.
Similarly, the U.S.-Iran war that broke out in February is fanning out through key chokepoints—energy, fertilizer, shipping—to systematically push global food prices upward.Disruptions to Strait of Hormuz transit are hitting agricultural commodities and every input the farming system depends on.
The International Energy Agency warns the fallout has already exceeded the 1970s oil crisis, with volatile oil prices directly inflating fuel costs for farm machinery and shipping. Freight rates and insurance premiums for global food transport have skyrocketed in tandem.
On top of that, roughly a third of the world’s urea moves through the Strait of Hormuz, making the conflict a direct chokehold on global fertilizer trade. Combined with export controls from fertilizer-producing nations like India, global fertilizer prices have surged up to 40%, sapping farmers’ planting confidence and hitting rice and soybean output hard in places like Thailand and Brazil.
The Iran war is also scrambling food export markets across the Middle East and South Asia. India and others face roadblocks shipping agricultural goods to the Middle East, while multiple countries have tightened food export restrictions to safeguard domestic supply—amplifying the global supply gap even further.
According to Iran’s foreign ministry, despite U.S. meddling, talks between Iran and Oman are moving forward constructively. The two sides have reached an agreement on transit protocols for the Strait of Hormuz, including alignment on the geographic coordinates of proposed routes. Once the new lanes go live, the two original shipping lanes that have served the strait for 60 years will be shuttered entirely. Vessels entering the Persian Gulf will transit Iranian-controlled lanes, while those exiting will use Omani-controlled lanes. These new routes are temporary, expected to remain operational for 2 to 4 months.
