El Niño: quarter of UK food imports – including rice, coffee and cocoa – from parts of world most exposed

When El Niño last hit in 2023/24, it compounded worsening impacts being driven by climate change, which are hitting harvests and driving up food prices. The price of coffee imports to the UK in 2025 from Brazil rose 77%, and from Vietnam by 39%, whilst the price of cocoa beans from Côte d’Ivoire doubled. In 2022, before that El Niño, climate change impacts in Pakistan pushed the price of rice up by a third, whilst late monsoon rains, such as have also hit this year, pushed the price of rice from India up 10%.

The UK imports most of our fruit (86% last year) [3], with lots of that coming from parts of the world likely to be hardest hit by El Niño. Almost all of our bananas (88% in 2025) come from South America, which tends to experience extreme heat and extreme rainfall during El Niño events. Grapes, raspberries, strawberries and lots of our citrus fruits come from countries in Africa, many of which are likely to see hotter weather and more prolonged droughts as El Niño turbo-charges the climate change driven extremes already hitting the continent – from where we also import most (58%) of our tea, with the bulk coming from Kenya. 

Whilst the most obvious threat is to those categories of fresh produce for which we are wholly or mostly reliant on imports, our food prices are also vulnerable to the damage El Niño, combined with climate change impacts, could do to global market prices for staples like, for instance, wheat. Although the UK is largely self-sufficient, producing almost all of the wheat that we consume in good years, global market prices will be driven by hits that could be taken by the world’s biggest producers of wheat, like India, Pakistan, China and Australia.  The UK does not produce enough wheat to significantly influence global commodity markets but rather would feel the impact of price rises on our own domestic wheat, whose prices are largely set by global prices.

Dereje Hirpa, spokesperson for the Oromia Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative Union [4], said:"El Nino is changing the weather in Ethiopia with higher temperatures and delayed and uneven rains, and intense rain forecast later in the year.  It's a worrying time: the 2015-16 El Nino brought drought and floods - seriously damaging harvests. At Oromia we are already supporting 10 local farmers' cooperatives to adopt practices such as agroforestry that build resilience. Planting trees protects coffee plants from the heat and heavy rain, adds nutrients and organic matter to the soil which boosts fertility and improves moisture retention. 

"However, a lack of adaptation finance means farmers' organisations have one hand tied behind our backs. With more direct access to funding we can expand our work to all 413 co-ops we support and help ensure UK consumers can continue to enjoy their morning coffee.”

The Oromia Coffee Farmer’s Co-operative Union represents over 560,000 smallholder coffee farmers in Ethiopia and exports Arabica coffee beans to the UK and across the globe. Coffee was the UK’s biggest import from Ethiopia in 2025, when we imported £14.1m worth.

Speaking of the importance of support for adapting to the threats posed by climate change, Dora Atiiga, a cocoa farmer and primary school founder in Kukuom, Ghana [15], said: “Cocoa farmers have a lot of challenges, but today the major challenge that really hits us hard is climate change, pests and disease, high cost of production, as well as unstable incomes. The diseases and the pests reduce our yields. It all leads to one thing, and that’s reduction of income for cocoa farmer. Despite all these challenges, Fairtrade is doing a lot to support each farmer to adapt to new ways of farming – to adapt to the modern way of farming. Climate change has not come to visit us, it has come to stay – so we have to adapt and find a way to deal with it.”

As many parts of the northern hemisphere reel from a succession of spring and summer heatwaves, extensive drought, and devastating wildfires, El Niño is intensifying over the coming months and is expected to be particularly strong. The UK Met Office has already forecast that it will be unprecedented in strength, possibly the strongest since the 19th century [5]. 

Head of International Programme at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Gareth Redmond-King said: “This devastating summer [6] has shown very starkly what climate change is doing to our weather with public services left struggling to cope, over 1,000 wildfires and suffocating heat through an unprecedented five heatwaves in the UK alone – the earliest two of which alone claimed 2,877 lives [7] – which have left us in a prolonged and intense period of drought. As we struggle in the wake of these extremes – knowing that they only get worse and more dangerous until we cut our planet-heating emissions to net zero – along comes probably the strongest El Niño we’ve yet faced. 

“The heat it will add into our climate system, on top of human-driven temperature rises, look almost certain to push 2027 to be the hottest year on record, at something like 1.7°C over and above pre-industrial revolution. This will fan the flames of climate change, turbo-charging the threats we have already seen hit food production at home and abroad in recent years. Impacts will hit nations from which we imported around £17 billion worth of food last year, not only threatening further price rises at home, but also the livelihoods and nutrition of the men and women who produce our food in some of the poorest countries of the world.”

Most of what we import from parts of the world likely to see the worst of El Niño are crops that we cannot grow in the UK, or could only grow at limited scale, with energy-intensive infrastructure. But some of what we import – like tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, and onions – we also grow in the UK for parts of the year. Increasingly, we are seeing impacts on these crops both overseas, and at home.

While El Niño's direct impact on the UK is less well established, the Met Office notes that this year’s is set to bring wetter and stormier weather in the UK this autumn and winter. The last El Niño saw much of the same, with record rainfall and widespread flooding hampering crop planting, reducing the wheat harvest by a fifth, and increasing livestock production costs.

Senior Economist on Food and Climate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, Chris Jaccarini said: “Extremes around the world have driven up food prices, with a small number of climate change-hit items disproportionately fuelling inflation [8] and deepening a cost-of-living crisis that is hitting the poorest hardest [9]. This is not just the food we import, but also what we grow at home. After five heatwaves and widespread drought, British arable farmers are now facing the worst harvest on record, meaning four of the five worst harvests will have occurred this decade (2020, 2024, 2025, 2026) [10] 

“And yet, without action, these could be the good years. Unless we rapidly cut emissions and strengthen resilience, climate change impact will continue to worsen with El Niño turbocharging the trend every few years.” 

Calculations that this latest El Niño could peak at 3.9°C in November 2026 [11] have led to predictions that it could push the average global temperature rise to around – or even above – 1.7°C in 2027 [12]. In 2025, the temperature rise was around 1.5°C, and overall, since pre-industrial times, humans have added an average 1.4°C temperature rise through our erosion of nature and burning of coal, oil and gas [13]. 1.7°C would make 2027 the hottest year on record. This additional heat will compound existing climate change impacts in the coming months. Shortages and price rises that have already been driven by climate change risk being turbo-charged by the additional heat brought by El Niño.

Nanci Githaiga, a tea producer from Kenya [15] – a country already hard-hit by climate change before El Niño compounds the threat - said:“To me, each and every one of us – from the farmer to the consumer – has a role to play to ensure that we mitigate against climate change. The industries which may not be on the ground… have to play their role of climate financing so that the farmers on the ground can get enough resources… to ensure sustainability.”

Whilst El Niño is a natural phenomenon about which we can do little beyond planning, some new science has suggested that climate change itself may play a role in intensifying El Niño events over the years [14]. Stopping climate change does remain within our grasp. The clear scientific consensus is that cutting our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by the middle of the century is the only solution we have to achieve this, and bring our climate back into balance. Without this, impacts worsen and become even more of a threat to our food production, meaning that a future El Niño would add even more danger.

ENDS