At Ghana’s Cocoa Processing Company, production ran at around 20% of capacity as processors in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana could not afford cocoa beans after prices surged.
The squeeze on those factories offers a view of how a weather shock can move through the food chain. The 2023–24 El Niño episode, alongside adverse weather, crop disease and longer-term structural constraints, reduced cocoa supplies from West Africa. Ghana’s crop is down 20 to 39% on last year’s 771,000 tonnes, while Bloomberg Intelligence expects world cocoa production to fall about 7% in 2026-27.
Cocoa prices surged by 250% during the 2023–2024 El Niño episode. The 2023–24 event took cocoa to a record $12,646 a tonne in December 2024.
Sugar also rose sharply during that episode. It reached its highest level in more than a decade during the 2023–2024 El Niño episode. Raw sugar climbed to 28.14 cents a pound in November 2023, its highest point since 2011.
Raw sugar rose 21.5% in August, the largest monthly gain since October 2010. Domestic sugar prices in India increased about 40% in two months.
Several rice-exporting countries imposed border restrictions during the 2023–2024 El Niño episode.
Separately, India’s rainfall from 1 June to 31 August was 13.8% below normal, and the USDA’s September report reduced its estimate for India’s milled rice crop to 147 million tonnes from 154.
CBOT rough rice is up 35% in 2026, reaching its highest level since July 2024. World food prices were near a four-year high in September, according to the UN.
India, Southeast Asia and Australia have the most concentrated exposure because of their central role in global production of rice, palm oil, coffee, sugar and wheat. In Indonesia, there were 758 fire hotspots in July and 9,409 in August.
The price effects can extend well beyond the places where crops are grown. The European Central Bank estimates that a strong El Niño could lift global food commodity prices by as much as 9% to 15%. Goldman Sachs estimates that a very strong event could produce a cumulative 15.8% increase in global food commodity prices by the second half of 2028.
Previous episodes point to the wider economic stakes. The 2015–16 El Niño event cost the world economy an estimated $7.8 trillion in lost productivity.
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