As climate forecasts warn of an extreme El Niño event unfolding across the globe this year, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) — a region that underpins global food security by feeding billions of people worldwide — faces an unprecedented dual crisis: the extreme weather event paired with an ongoing global fertiliser shortage that threatens to upend agricultural production, destabilize rural economies, and erode social fabric across much of the region.
Individually, each of these stressors already presents severe challenges for LAC’s agricultural sector. When combined, however, they threaten to create a catastrophic perfect storm that will disrupt livelihoods for millions of small and medium-sized producers and push dozens of nations closer to widespread food insecurity.
International meteorological forecasts have placed the probability of a strong El Niño developing in 2024 at exceptionally high levels, and its impacts are projected to be deeply uneven across the region. While parts of the Southern Cone, including key grain-producing regions of Argentina and Brazil, may see boosted rainfall and recovering crop yields, the outlook is far grimmer for other parts of LAC. Central America, the Caribbean basin, and northern South America face elevated risks of extreme weather disruption: some areas will be battered by catastrophic flooding and heavy unseasonal rains, while others will grapple with prolonged, debilitating drought and chronic water scarcity. The greatest source of uncertainty, analysts note, is the potential for this El Niño to reach far greater intensity than historical events, amplifying all associated risks.
For these at-risk subregions, the consequences are already well-documented by recent history: diminished crop yields, widespread total crop loss, reduced livestock productivity, broken agricultural supply chains, and skyrocketing food prices are all but guaranteed if no preemptive action is taken. These impacts will add up to billions of dollars in unplanned costs for both producers and consumers, and directly push millions into deeper food insecurity. Beyond immediate production shocks, the long-term ripple effects in rural communities often include unsustainable producer debt, increased out-migration from rural areas, and widespread nutritional decline among vulnerable populations.
For small and medium-sized agricultural producers, who make up the majority of food producers across much of LAC, this overlapping crisis creates impossible planning conditions. Unpredictable climate patterns make basic decisions — what crops to plant, how much capital to invest, what volume of fertiliser to apply — far too risky to navigate confidently. When fertiliser prices rise or supply becomes unreliable, many producers have no choice but to cut fertiliser application rates, reduce the total area of land they plant, or switch to lower-yielding, less nutrient-demanding crops — all choices that immediately cut total food production and raise market prices.
Unlike past eras when climate events like El Niño and its cool counterpart La Niña could only be tracked after they emerged, modern forecasting technology gives the region the ability to anticipate these events, their impacts, and their long-term consequences far in advance. It is no longer acceptable, argues Muhammad Ibrahim, Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), for governments and stakeholders to limit their response to reactive emergency action only after drought has taken hold, floods have destroyed communities, crops have been lost, and prices have spiked. Preemptive, early action to minimize harm is not just possible — it is an imperative.
To that end, Ibrahim calls for immediate progress toward a coordinated, proactive regional resilience strategy. The core of this strategy must be a broad hemispheric dialogue focused on building agri-food resilience, bringing all key stakeholders to the table: national governments, multilateral international organizations, small and large producer associations, the global financial sector, academic research institutions, and private industry. The shared end goal of this dialogue is to build robust regional anticipation capabilities that can protect both agricultural production and rural livelihoods.
In this effort, international technical cooperation bodies have a unique and critical role to play. With existing cross-border coordination frameworks, deep ties to national governments, producer networks, private industry, and multilateral financial institutions, these organizations can facilitate the creation of regional cooperation agreements, drive preemptive proactive response planning, and coordinate emergency aid and cross-border solidarity efforts if crises do emerge.
A number of actionable public-private collaboration mechanisms can be advanced immediately to address the dual crisis. These include establishing dedicated regional coordination platforms for climate and agricultural risk management; negotiating pre-crisis supply agreements with fertiliser producers and logistics firms to guarantee consistent access to inputs for vulnerable regions; developing innovative climate-focused financial instruments in partnership with public and private banking institutions; expanding access to affordable climate risk insurance for small producers; and rolling out joint technological adaptation programs tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized agricultural operations.
Private sector participation is not a secondary concern — it is essential to making these resilience strategies viable and scalable across the region. Chemical fertiliser companies, large agribusiness operations, commercial banks, technology developers, and agricultural export chains all hold core capabilities that are required to build shared agricultural resilience that benefits all producers.
Another top regional priority must be strengthening early warning systems and turning raw climate data into actionable, user-friendly decision-making tools for producers. While LAC generates vast amounts of high-quality meteorological and agricultural data that holds immense value for risk planning, this information rarely reaches on-the-ground producers in a timely, accessible format — a gap that must be closed immediately to reduce avoidable losses.
Other core objectives for regional coordination include accelerating the widespread adoption of drought-resistant crop varieties, scaling up efficient water management infrastructure and practices, and integrating advanced digital technologies — including GPS mapping, agricultural drones, and soil moisture sensors — into mainstream agronomic management strategy across the region.
Ibrahim emphasizes that the dual crisis, while severe, also presents a generational opportunity: the chance to build a new system of agri-food governance rooted in cross-regional cooperation, innovative technology, and forward-looking risk planning, rather than reactive emergency response.
As a region that produces food for billions of people across the globe, protecting LAC’s agricultural productive capacity is far more than a domestic economic challenge. It is a strategic priority for global development, rural social stability, and the long-term food security of the entire world.