The Super Niño Turns a Food Crisis into a Public Health Threat Across Latin America and the Caribbean

The Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural cycle of warming and cooling in the equatorial Pacific that shifts rainfall patterns worldwide. El Niño, the warm phase, has occurred for millennia. But global warming is making it stronger — ENSO swings have grown up to 10% more intense since 1960 due to rising greenhouse gases.⁸ When this pushes Pacific sea surface temperatures 3 to 4°C above normal, scientists call it a “Super Niño” — an extreme El Niño that triggers severe droughts and floods simultaneously across entire continents.⁴⁶

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) now forecasts a 62% probability of a new El Niño emerging by mid-2026, with conditions that could reach Super Niño intensity by the end of the year.^29,43 For Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where 167 million people faced food insecurity in 2024,¹⁶ the consequences extend well beyond agriculture — each Super Niño cycle carries direct implications for nutritional health and health systems.

The Effects of Super Niño on LAC’s Nutritional Health and Food Security

As of 2024, 167 million people across LAC — one in four — face moderate or severe food insecurity, meaning they lack regular access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. Within that broader picture, over 33 million are undernourished — chronically unable to meet their minimum caloric needs.¹⁶ Both indicators reveal deep subregional disparities. Undernourishment reaches 17.4% in the Caribbean (with Haiti alone at 54.2%), compared to 5.0% in Mesoamerica and 3.8% in South America. Moderate or severe food insecurity — which captures not only hunger but also the inability to afford a healthy diet — affects 51.9% of the Caribbean population, 25.9% of Mesoamerica, and 22.2% of South America.¹⁶

At the country level, these subregional averages mask a more complex picture. Haiti’s 54.2% undernourishment and 83.2% food insecurity place it in a category of its own — but the crisis is not confined to one country. Bolivia (21.8% undernourishment), Honduras (14.8%), and Ecuador (12.1%) all face undernourishment rates well above their subregional averages, while Jamaica (56.4% food insecurity), Guatemala (48.8%), and El Salvador (45.5%) show that nearly half their populations cannot reliably access a healthy diet. Among the countries for which both indicators are available, a consistent pattern emerges: food insecurity is typically several times higher than undernourishment. This means that in those countries, millions of people who are not technically hungry are nonetheless eating poorly — unable to afford the diverse, nutrient-rich diets that protect against malnutrition.

The Super Niño pushes these numbers upward by devastating food production on a regional scale — through drought in some areas and floods in others, often simultaneously. During the 2023–2024 El Niño, 1.3 million people were exposed to severe drought across eight LAC countries,⁴⁷ and 74% of the region’s countries faced high exposure to extreme weather events that directly undermined food security.¹⁵ For instance, Brazil experienced its worst drought since the 1950s, with 59% of its territory affected¹ and agricultural production falling 7.2%.²¹ Peru’s El Niño Costero destroyed 6,000 hectares of fruit crops in the north of the country.³ In Central America’s Dry Corridor, 486,000 people were already affected by severe drought in 2023, and 2.7 million people are projected to need emergency food assistance in 2026 due to El Niño-related impacts.⁴⁸

These disruptions to food supply are closely linked to population health outcomes, with two main pathways that are likely to worsen in parallel. The first is acute malnutrition. When harvests fail, the most vulnerable see their access to food significantly reduced. Children under five are the most immediately affected: their growth depends on adequate nutrition during the first 1,000 days of life, and even temporary deprivation can cause lasting damage. During the 2015 Niño, nearly 6 million additional children became underweight globally across the tropics.⁵ In LAC, the 2023–2024 Niño destroyed crops on 54,000 hectares in Guatemala alone,⁴⁵ and by October 2024 the country had reported 25,000 cases of acute malnutrition in children under five, with 21% classified as severe and 50 associated deaths.³¹

The second pathway is the double burden of malnutrition. When food prices spike, families do not simply go hungry — they shift to what they can afford. In Latin America, ultra-processed foods tend to be sold at lower prices than fresh foods, an important factor for the millions of people living in precarious financial situations.^26,37 This matters because higher ultra-processed food consumption is associated with increased overweight and obesity: a systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis found that every 10% increase in ultra-processed food consumption as a share of daily calorie intake was associated with a 7% higher risk of overweight and a 6% higher risk of obesity.²⁸ While no study has yet directly measured this shift as a consequence of an El Niño event, the mechanism is plausible: the Super Niño drives food price spikes, and food price spikes are known to push dietary patterns toward ultra-processed foods. If this pathway operates as the evidence suggests, each Super Niño cycle could deepen not only hunger but also the region’s rising rates of child overweight.

The scale of this vulnerability is visible in the share of LAC’s population that already cannot afford a healthy diet. In Haiti, that figure reaches 87.2%; in Belize 62.4%, Guatemala 47.8%, and Panama 43.7%. Even in upper-middle-income countries like Chile (40.2%), Colombia (36.1%), and Uruguay (34.0%), roughly a third of the population is priced out of adequate nutrition — before a Super Niño drives costs higher.¹⁶

What makes these health consequences especially alarming is their permanence. Anttila-Hughes et al.⁵ found that El Niño-driven weight loss in children persists over time and is detectable years later as reduced height, suggesting that a single climate cycle can leave a lasting imprint on physical development. Evidence from within the region reinforces this pattern: in Ecuador, children exposed to the severe 1997–1998 El Niño floods during the third trimester in utero were measurably shorter five to seven years later, while those exposed in the first trimester scored lower on cognitive tests — showing how a single El Niño event can translate into lasting losses in both physical growth and cognitive development.⁴¹

The Challenge of Building Food Systems That Withstand the Super Niño and Protect Nutritional Health

Addressing the health consequences of Super Niño requires food systems that can withstand its shocks. The ones currently prevalent in LAC cannot. The region’s food production relies heavily on monocultures — vast areas planted with a single crop. Satellite analysis shows that the area cultivated with soybean in South America more than doubled between 2000 and 2019, rising from 26.4 million to 55.1 million hectares.⁴⁴ Sugarcane follows a similar pattern: Brazil alone dedicates over 8.6 million hectares to the crop,⁴² while oil palm plantations have expanded to about 1.28 million hectares, led by Colombia (499,364 ha), Honduras (217,000 ha), Guatemala (210,000 ha), Brazil (197,165 ha), and Ecuador (152,529 ha).¹⁸

This dependence on a few crops across enormous stretches of land is the core of the problem. When a Super Niño brings drought or flooding to a monoculture region, it hits every hectare in the same way — because every hectare grows the same crop with the same vulnerabilities. A single climate shock can wipe out an entire harvest at once, with nothing else planted to compensate for the loss.²⁵ Research confirms the risk: an analysis of five decades of data across 91 nations found that countries with the lowest effective crop diversity experienced a national yield decline of more than 25% approximately once every eight years. In contrast, nations with the highest levels of stability faced such a severe decline only once every 123 years.³⁹

Agricultural policy across LAC has actively reinforced this fragility. The region is the world’s largest net agrifood-exporting area, accounting for 45% of net international agrifood trade.¹² Across multiple countries, public policy has historically followed an agro-export development model — through rural credit concentrated on export commodities, trade liberalization frameworks, and price guarantee programs for crops destined for foreign markets — that prioritizes commodity production while marginalizing family farmers.¹⁹

Family farming — characterized by diversified production systems that preserve traditional food production, agrobiodiversity, and the cultural values of rural communities¹⁹ — represents 81% of farms in LAC (17.8 million holdings) and accounts for over 50% of the cultivated area of basic food crops such as vegetables, fruits, and cereals.¹¹ However, it faces limited access to formal credit and essential inputs.³² According to the OECD,³² “closing an estimated annual financing gap of USD 98 billion is needed to transform the food system in LAC, with the majority needed in South America (USD 73 billion) and Central America (USD 23 billion).” The result is a policy landscape that optimizes for global commodity markets while systematically underinvesting in the local food systems that feed the region’s most vulnerable populations.

Agroecology and Future Smart Foods: Alternatives for Climate Resilience and Nutritional Health

A path toward climate resilience and better nutritional health in LAC — particularly in the context of the vulnerabilities that the Super Niño exposes — can be found in agroecological diversification, local seed systems, and climate-adapted crops. Together, these approaches contribute to food sovereignty: the ability of communities and nations to define and sustain their own food systems.

Agroecology is an approach to farming that works with ecological processes rather than replacing them with external inputs. Instead of planting a single crop across vast areas, agroecological farmers grow multiple crops together — combining species that share nutrients, reduce pest pressure on each other, and respond differently to climate stress. They rotate crops to regenerate soils and integrate trees and livestock to hold water and protect against extreme weather. The underlying principle is that diversity at the field level builds resilience: when one species fails due to drought or flooding, others can play their role, providing a compensation capacity that buffers the entire system.²

Evidence from across LAC shows that agroecological systems perform better under climate stress. After Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America in 1998, a study of 880 paired plots across 181 communities in Nicaragua found that agroecological farms had on average 40% more topsoil, higher soil moisture, and lower economic losses than conventional farms under the same topographical conditions — and the advantage increased with storm intensity.²⁰ Cuba’s farmer-to-farmer agroecology movement (MACAC) has reached over 200,000 farmers,⁹ with the peasant sector producing roughly 65% of the island’s food.⁴ Brazil’s National School Feeding Program (PNAE) connects more than 40 million students to local, diversified food production by mandating that at least 30% of federal school feeding funds go to family farming (this mandatory share recently increased to 45 percent in 2025).³⁴

Agroecological systems also strengthen nutritional health — and this is where Future Smart Foods (FSFs) become relevant. FSFs are crops that meet four criteria simultaneously: they are nutrient-dense, climate-resilient, economically viable, and locally available.²⁴ Many of them are species that Indigenous and peasant communities across LAC have cultivated for centuries but that fell out of production in favor of modern staples such as standard varieties of maize, rice, and wheat, as agricultural policy prioritized a small number of high-yield crops for global markets.²² Latin America is home to a rich diversity of these neglected species, as the next table shows:

These crops offer what monoculture staples cannot: diverse micronutrients that address the nutritional deficiencies behind the double burden of malnutrition. Diversified farms produce diversified diets — particularly when production is oriented toward household consumption rather than export — and diversified diets are the most effective way to ensure adequate micronutrient intake across populations.^24,22 A systematic review of 15 studies found that dietary diversity is a valid indicator of micronutrient adequacy in children under five; all studies reviewed reported that higher diversity scores — specifically consuming at least four food groups — are positively associated with the essential nutrients required for growth and development.²⁷

Health Systems Preparedness: The Missing Side of the Response

Resilient food systems address the supply side — but the health consequences of the Super Niño also demand a health system response. ENSO forecasts can signal an El Niño event months in advance, and we already know what follows: malnutrition spikes, vector and waterborne disease outbreaks, direct injuries and fatalities, disruption of health services, and mental health impacts.³⁶

The evidence of this gap is stark. Disease activity during El Niño years is 2.5–28% higher than in non-El Niño years, with dengue outbreaks in Brazil directly linked to elevated temperatures during the 2015–2016 event.⁶ Health infrastructure is equally exposed: during the 2017 El Niño Costero in Peru, 934 health posts were severely damaged by flooding,¹⁷ and by 2020, only 4% had been rebuilt.³³ Peru’s departments most affected by the 2017 El Niño went on to report the highest COVID-19 case fatality ratios in 2020 — revealing how ENSO-driven damage leaves populations persistently more vulnerable to subsequent health crises.³⁸

In this context, what is needed is a shift from emergency response to anticipatory action. Anttila-Hughes et al.⁵ explicitly recommend that “governments and agencies engaged in multi-year humanitarian planning should incorporate ENSO forecasts to anticipate fluctuations in resource availability needed to ensure progress in fighting malnutrition.” Ortiz-Prado et al.³⁶ outline specific priorities for LAC: establishing early warning systems that link meteorological forecasting to health preparedness, building resilient health infrastructure, coordinating across health, environmental, and agricultural sectors to address the multiple simultaneous hazards that El Niño produces, and ensuring uninterrupted health service provision during ENSO emergencies.

Advances, Gaps, and the Path Forward

On the food systems side, important policy progress is underway. In December 2024, the Latin American and Caribbean Parliament (Parlatino) unanimously approved the first regional Model Law for the Promotion of Agroecology — a framework of ten chapters and 39 articles designed to help member countries enact national legislation fostering agroecological transitions, drafted with FAO technical support.¹³ FAO has also developed the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE), a digital tool that “collects data at the farm level, assesses the progress towards agroecology, and quantifies its diverse benefits,” compiling “global harmonized evidence to showcase how agroecology can drive the shift towards more sustainable agricultural and food systems.”¹⁴

Yet significant evidence gaps remain. LAC-wide adoption data linking agroecology to measurable climate resilience or health outcomes at regional scale does not yet exist. The research community understands ENSO’s agricultural impacts and agroecology’s benefits separately, but no study has yet measured how agroecological systems specifically perform during El Niño or La Niña events across the region.

On the health side, WHO and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) are supporting countries in the development of Heat Health Action Plans — a broader initiative that includes strengthening surveillance of heat-related health impacts, improving the use of heatwave early warning systems by the health sector, building public health measures at the local level to increase community resilience, and preparing hospitals and health infrastructure for extreme heat events.⁴⁹ However, a dedicated climate-nutrition surveillance system that links ENSO forecasts to nutritional monitoring and early intervention has not been established as an operational program in LAC. Anttila-Hughes et al.⁵ explicitly call for ENSO-informed hunger early warning systems that would allow “proactive instead of reactive” deployment of nutrition support, while Ortiz-Prado et al.³⁶ more broadly urge early warning and forecasting systems for El Niño health preparedness, listing malnutrition among the primary health consequences requiring attention. This makes it difficult to deploy emergency screening and supplementary feeding before malnutrition peaks, rather than after.

The Super Niño Is Coming — Will LAC Be Ready?

The next Super Niño will test both LAC’s food and health systems. The knowledge to build resilient alternatives already exists — in rural and peasant communities that have practiced agroecology for generations, and in the scientific evidence linking ENSO forecasts to predictable health outcomes. What is missing is targeted research connecting agroecology to ENSO-specific resilience, the integration of climate forecasting into health and nutrition planning, and the political will to invest in both before the crisis arrives. Whether the region acts on what it already knows — or responds with emergency aid alone — will determine how many of its 167 million food-insecure people face deeper crisis, and how many children carry the irreversible marks of malnutrition into adulthood.