“Super El Niño” Underway And More Global Food Supply Chains Under Threat

This “Super El Niño” Has The Potential To Be The Strongest Ever

Michael Snyder

Global food supply chains are under threat like never before. The war with Iran has created a worldwide fertilizer crisis, diesel prices have risen to very painful levels, and farmers in the U.S. have been dealing with an epic multi-year drought. Now a “Super El Niño” is here, and Fox News is telling us that it has the potential to be the “strongest Super El Niño ever”. In fact, we have being warned that as it is influenced by a gigantic “9,000-mile marine heatwave” that has developed in the northern Pacific, it could actually become a “Godzilla El Niño”. I am convinced that over the next 12 months we will see things happen on this planet that most people never even imagined were possible. In fact, absolutely crazy weather events are already happening all over the world.

Earlier this month, the NOAA announced that an El Niño had begun, and now NASA has officially confirmed this…

The Super El Niño is ‘underway’, NASA has confirmed, following satellite observations of sea surface height across the Pacific.

Measurements taken by the Sentinel–6 Michael Freilich satellite show that sea levels across parts of the equatorial Pacific are elevated.

‘When ocean water warms, it expands in volume and causes the sea surface to rise—making the water’s height a reliable indicator of ocean temperatures,’ NASA explained.

‘Warmer–than–normal temperatures, hence higher sea surface heights, in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean are associated with El Niño.’

Every time there is a “Super El Niño” some parts of the world are going to experience drought.

That is just the reality of what we are facing.

In the late 1870s, a particularly strong “Super El Niño” caused widespread global droughts that resulted in the deaths of approximately 50 million people…

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine.

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

From everything that I have seen, I would say that it is very likely that the Super El Niño that has now begun could potentially be much stronger than the Super El Niño of 1877-1878.

And that is quite noteworthy, because that Super El Niño was one of the worst environmental disasters in recorded history…

“It was arguably the worst environmental disaster to ever befall humanity and one of the worst calamities of any sort in at least the last 150 years,” the authors of a 2018 research article in the Journal of Climate wrote in their paper. “In a very real sense, the El Niño and climate events of 1876–78 helped create the global inequalities that would later be characterized as ‘first world’ and ‘third world.’”

Even if there was no Super El Niño, global food production would be way down this year due to the global fertilizer crisis, higher diesel prices and ongoing droughts in major breadbaskets around the world.

But now the Super El Niño that is upon us threatens to cause “deep production shortfalls” in some of our most important crop producing regions…

El Niño events cause droughts in major crop producing regions across the Western Pacific (e.g., eastern Indonesia, the Philippines, SE China), southern Africa, the western Sahel, north-central India, and the northeast part of South America. These conditions in turn lead to significant declines in staple crop production in those areas. A one-in-a-hundred year El Niño is likely to cause deep production shortfalls, driving up demand for traded products to compensate, and raising global food prices.

There are just four crops that account for over 60 percent of all calories consumed by the global population.

Unfortunately, it is being projected that those four crops will be hit really hard…

Globally, there is a heightened risk of a shock to global food supply chains. Four crops – wheat, rice, maize and soybeans – provide more than 60% of the world’s calorie intake.

Maize and rice are especially sensitive to El Niño, with drought and disrupted monsoons reducing yields in major producers such as South Africa, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and Brazil. Wheat is affected by heat and drought in key exporters like Australia, Canada and China, while soybean production has fallen in countries such as Brazil and Argentina.

None of us have ever experienced anything like this in our entire lifetimes.

Global famines are ahead of us. The only question is how widespread they will become.

Right now we are still eating food that was produced last year to a very large degree.

The turning point will come at harvest time this fall.

Food prices will start to rise even higher in wealthy nations, and in poor nations there simply won’t be enough food to eat at all.

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