Not just the War, not just fossil fuel greed, not just supply chains and shortage of fertilizers, climate adds further pressure to food prices, affecting the most vulnerable.
Analysts at Zero Carbon Analytics, an international research firm, mapped food price spikes between 2022 and 2026, tracing them to extreme weather events they say are tied to climate change.
So far this year, they’ve connected all but one of the price jumps they documented to unprecedented temperatures, drought or rainfall, meaning the events were more extreme than any similar instance in the historical climate record. The lone exception was a winter storm that sent US tomato prices soaring about 40% but wasn’t made worse by climate change.
The findings are part of the growing body of research into how climate change is reshaping inflation, a phenomenon some economists dub “climateflation.”
“Climateflation represents a permanent rise in everyday living costs driven by fossil fuel dependency and extreme weather destruction, locking in persistent inflation that strains household budgets worldwide,” Joanne Bentley-McKune, a climate scientist and lead author of the Zero Carbon Analytics briefing, said in a state
US consumers are likely to face steeper prices for their morning latte, thanks to the near-record strong super El Niño still strengthening in the Pacific Ocean. El Niño is expected to combine with preexisting supply chain pressures around the world to increase prices on tropical products such as coffee, chocolate and palm oil.
But the developing countries where those products are grown are likely to face the largest impacts, said Christopher Barrett, who teaches food and agricultural economics at Cornell University. This is because developing countries have less capacity to adapt to shortages of key agricultural products like fertilizer, poor harvests of maize and other staple crops, and less resilience to bounce back from extreme weather and climate events.
This El Niño, which is forecast to peak this fall and winter, comes at an already challenging time for food prices, given supply chain pressures from geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and Black Sea.
“We’re not in normal times,” Barrett said. This makes the ongoing El Niñosomewhat of a food supply wild card. Still, many experts expect El Niño to cause localized food supply crises, particularly in eastern and southern Africa, while global impacts remain more limited.