The probability of a Super El Nino in 2026-27 has reached 50-50. Brazil's soy planting season begins in roughly four months. The global food system is already under pressure from the Hormuz shipping disruption. These three facts together are the agricultural story no one is connecting this morning. [1]

Brazil grows roughly a third of the world's soybeans. A Super El Nino — defined as a sea surface temperature anomaly significantly above the threshold for a standard El Nino — produces drought conditions across Brazil's central soy belt, centered on Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, and Goiás. The 2015-16 Super El Nino cut Brazilian soy production by approximately 8% in the regions it hit hardest. A repeat event at the wrong point in the growing cycle — and the planting window is precisely the wrong point — would reduce the crop before it is in the ground. [2]

The compound risk is what elevates this from a weather story to a commodity shock story. Global food prices have already been moving on the Hormuz disruption: shipping rerouting has added cost and time to grain and oilseed shipments from the Middle East, and the uncertainty premium has been priced into forward contracts. A Brazilian soy shortfall arriving on top of Hormuz-related logistics stress would hit a food system that has already absorbed one supply-side shock and has limited buffer capacity to absorb a second.

Lucia Vega's version of this story is the one that plays out in the Southern Cone and in the import-dependent economies of Africa and Southeast Asia, where soy-derived animal feed prices translate directly into meat and protein costs for populations with no hedging mechanism. The Super El Nino is a 50-50 probability. The consequences of the 50 that matters are not evenly distributed.

-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo