The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration puts the probability of a “very strong” El Niño through the Northern Hemisphere autumn and winter at above 90%, with a 69% chance the event reaches an “exceptional” threshold that could exceed anything recorded since 1950. For Latin American farmers, the practical question is which crops face the most exposure as the 2026-27 growing season gets under way across the region.
Colombia’s coffee sector offers the clearest early estimate. Production is expected to decline roughly 8%, from 13.7 million 60-kilogram bags in 2025 to approximately 12.5 million bags in 2026, according to sector forecasts tracking El Niño’s effect on the country’s growing regions. That decline would tighten global arabica supply at a time when coffee prices are already sensitive to weather disruption anywhere along the supply chain.
Argentina and Brazil face a more complicated picture, with El Niño’s impact varying by geography within each country. Southern growing regions are expected to see excess moisture and possible planting delays, while northern areas face heightened heat and drought risk, a split that complicates national-level crop forecasting and could leave some regions overwhelmed with rain while others dry out entirely.
Mexico, Central America and the coffee-and-drought pattern
Drought probabilities exceeding 50% are forecast for vulnerable agricultural zones across Mexico and Central America, a region where El Niño-linked dry spells have historically hit subsistence maize farmers hardest. Peru, meanwhile, faces a different set of risks: infrastructure disruption, coastal warming and knock-on effects for its fisheries sector, which depends on cold-water currents that El Niño temporarily disrupts along the Pacific coast for months at a time.
The scale of the ocean warming driving these forecasts is unusual even by El Niño standards. Sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 benchmark region have reached 1.4°C above normal, while the Niño 1+2 region off the coast of Peru and Ecuador is running 2.9°C above normal, according to NOAA data. That gap between the two regions reflects how strongly this event is concentrated near the South American coastline, precisely where Peru’s fisheries and coastal agriculture sit exposed.
Insurers and commodity traders have started pricing that regional concentration into their planning, according to sector commentary tracking the forecast, treating Peru’s coastal exposure and Colombia’s highland coffee belt as distinct risk zones rather than a single undifferentiated “Latin America” forecast. That granularity matters for governments deciding where to direct drought contingency funds and crop insurance subsidies ahead of the planting season.
Forecasters are careful to note that probability is not certainty at the farm level. “A powerful El Niño shifts probabilities, but it cannot determine rainfall on an individual farm months in advance,” one seasonal outlook noted, a caveat that matters for how governments and insurers should treat the forecast. Regional probability shifts do not translate directly into farm-by-farm predictions, even when the underlying ocean signal is unusually strong and well documented.
That uncertainty has not stopped agricultural ministries and commodity traders across the region from treating this El Niño Latin America agriculture forecast as a planning input rather than background noise. With the World Meteorological Organization separately describing the same event as historically unprecedented in its intensity, the region’s farmers are entering the 2026-27 season with less room for error than usual, whatever the exact rainfall totals turn out to be by harvest time.
Crop insurance schemes across the region will face their own test this season. Insurers typically price policies against historical rainfall variability, and an event forecasters are calling exceptional by historical standards could produce losses that existing actuarial models were not built to anticipate, a gap that may only become visible once claims start arriving from Colombia’s highlands or Argentina’s grain belt.
