As El Niño looms, guard against food inflation

📌 Summary:

• Southwest monsoon is in serious deficit: cumulative all-India rainfall (June 1–22) is 42.8% below normal, even before El Niño's impact has kicked in
• Monsoon arrived 3 days late over Kerala (June 4) and made no progress June 15–21, due to weak monsoon winds, dry northwesterlies and absence of an active Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO)
• Global climate agencies forecast the current El Niño to intensify into a "strong" event by Aug–Sep and "very strong" over Oct–Jan; the last two strong-to-very-strong events (2015-16, 2023-24) produced drought years
• Causal chain (why El Niño threatens food inflation): (1) deficient/late monsoon depresses kharif sowing acreage; (2) El Niño raises temperatures, hitting rabi (winter-spring) crops if it peaks Oct–Jan; (3) lower output feeds into future food price spikes
• Cushion so far: two consecutive good years (2024-25, 2025-26) gave record outputs of wheat, rice, maize, sugar, soyabean, rapeseed and palm oil; abundant stocks have kept international food prices stable even as crude oil, gas, coal, fertilisers and metals surged after the US-Israel war on Iran
• Solutions urged: keep the import window open (preferable to knee-jerk export bans/restrictions); protect farmers via expedited crop surveys and insurance payments for prevented/failed sowing or yield loss; make the new rural employment programme a model scheme from its July 1 launch

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS3 — food security, buffer stocks and the monsoon-agriculture-inflation linkage; GS1 Geography — El Niño and monsoon dynamics.

📝 Prelims Facts:

• El Niño = abnormal warming of the central-eastern equatorial Pacific; associated with a weak Indian monsoon
• Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO): an eastward-moving band of cloud and rainfall that modulates monsoon activity
• Normal monsoon onset over Kerala: June 1
• Kharif = monsoon-sown crops; Rabi = winter-spring crops

🔑 Key Term: El Niño — the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Pacific warming that typically suppresses the Indian southwest monsoon and raises drought and food-inflation risk.