THE GLOBAL WINDOW OF TURKISH FOOD AND AGRICULTURE The Global Window of Turkish Food and Agriculture Sector
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August 2026…
The El Niño event in the equatorial Pacific strengthened through June and July 2026 and several meteorological agencies assess it could become the strongest in roughly 150 years, peaking in the autumn–winter and decaying through mid-2027. Grain futures have moved ahead of any confirmed losses: in July, wheat rose 8.60 percent, maize 6.24 percent, soybeans 3.91 percent and cotton 6.37 percent. FAO Chief Economist Maximo Torero, interviewed by China’s National Business Daily on August 4, described global food supply and demand as still manageable, with structural risks accumulating.
The macro picture can be summarized briefly. FAO currently forecasts wheat production down about 4.3 percent and rice down 1.8 percent, with maize roughly flat and soybeans still growing — figures Torero cautioned against reading as El Niño-attributed losses. Wheat carries the largest expected decline, compounded by a Black Sea corridor running at about one-third of former capacity; rice is the most fragile in trade terms given its thin international market. The widely quoted figure of 21.4 million additional hungry people is a conditional model estimate — it materializes only if export restrictions are imposed on top of a strong El Niño shock, which has not happened. Global cereal stocks, at a stocks-to-use ratio of about 32 percent, can absorb a moderate shock; the real vulnerability is uneven distribution.
For the crop input industry, however, the more consequential content of the interview sits in the farm-economics detail rather than the food-security headline. Asked whether rising costs would drive land abandonment, Torero said abandonment is not the baseline scenario. What farmers do first is ration inputs: cut fertilizer application, delay planting, switch crops and seasonally fallow marginal land.
That rationing is not hypothetical. Torero stated that disruption around the Strait of Hormuz has already caused a marked decline in input use, while global grain and oilseed freight costs in June ran about 24 percent above year-earlier levels. Farm margins are being squeezed from both ends — input and logistics costs rising faster than the revenue side, where the July price rally is a weather premium that AMIS forward curves still classify as temporary rather than structural. Taken together, Torero’s account suggests that the intuitive chain “higher grain prices → stronger input purchasing” may not hold this season: the cost pressure on farmers is immediate, while the price gains may not persist into their next selling window.
The timing threshold Torero identified is worth noting. Risks escalate sharply, he said, if input supply disruption lasts three months or more and begins to affect the next production cycle. For input suppliers, that frames the question for the 2027 season: whether current fertilizer cutbacks extend into next year’s application decisions, and whether crop switching — one of the adaptation responses he listed — shifts demand profiles across product categories. Both remain open questions rather than established trends; no quantified demand impact is available at this stage.
On the longer horizon, Torero’s prescription for extreme climate — climate-resilient agriculture — doubles as a rough map of where adaptation spending concentrates: early warning systems, drought- and heat-tolerant seed, crop diversification, irrigation and water management, soil health, digital agriculture, agricultural insurance and storage and transport infrastructure. He stressed these must be locally adapted rather than uniformly applied.
Two variables are worth tracking over the coming months: whether input cutbacks persist past the three-month threshold into the 2027 production cycle and whether Asian rice and wheat exporters move toward export restrictions — the trigger condition for the scenario FAO is working through AMIS to prevent…
Source: www.agropages.com
