IFAD Report Puts El Niño's Possible Global Cost at Up to $11 Trillion

The El Niño weather pattern could cost the global economy as much as $11 trillion and place serious strain on food security, according to a new report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) reported by UN News on 9 November 2026. The UN agency, which works on rural poverty in developing countries, frames El Niño as one of several overlapping climate and economic shocks bearing down on small-scale food producers.

Shocks that travel beyond the farm gate

IFAD's central argument, as summarised by UN News, is that disruption in agriculture does not stay in agriculture. The agency warns that losses on farms ripple outward into the wider economy, affecting processing, transport and distribution as well as production itself.

The report points to 2026 as an illustration of how quickly those effects can compound. According to IFAD, global energy and fertiliser shocks pushed up costs across food systems within the space of a single planting season, touching every link in the chain from the field to the market.

That combination — a climate shock such as El Niño arriving alongside a price shock — is the scenario IFAD's modelling is designed to test. The agency's concern is that measures taken in isolation leave farmers exposed on whichever front is not covered.

Bundled investment nearly doubles the protection

To build resilience, the IFAD report calls for what it describes as bundled investments: packages that simultaneously help farmers reach markets, obtain agricultural inputs and technologies, and access financial services including credit and weather insurance.

The modelling behind the recommendation produced two headline numbers. IFAD found that financial support on its own, such as insurance, reduces farm-income losses by 9.8 per cent. Combining investments in inputs, markets and finance cuts those losses by 18.7 per cent — a result the agency describes as nearly twice as effective when drought and price shocks strike at the same time.

"Resilience is not built by investing in single interventions, but by connecting investments in inputs, markets and finance so that gains in one area are not lost in another," said Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, in remarks carried by UN News.

The $11 trillion figure is presented by IFAD as an upper bound on potential cost to the global economy rather than a settled accounting, and the agency ties it to food security impacts rather than to any single country's losses.

Displacement in Mozambique and a vaccination drive in Yemen

The same UN News briefing carried two other items. In northern Mozambique, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that more than 7,000 people were displaced during the four-week period to the end of October, driven by non-State armed groups. The province — described by UN News as roughly the size of Austria — now hosts more than 205,000 people across over 80 displacement sites.

"They are displaced because of…these non-State armed groups that are invading their villages, that are threatening them, or they hear rumours that they are going to be coming," said Dana Graber Ladek, IOM Chief of Mission in Mozambique. She told UN News that many host communities face high poverty and lack healthcare, water and sanitation, and that "food is their number one need, along with shelter" and work. Years of insurgent attacks have undermined communities that traditionally depended on fishing and farming.

In Yemen, the World Health Organization (WHO) is launching a measles-rubella vaccination campaign aimed at more than 957,196 children aged 6 to 59 months across 11 governorates in the south of the country. With financing from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, WHO said the campaign will deploy 2,291 vaccination teams — 643 fixed teams based at health facilities and 1,648 mobile teams working directly in communities, including recently displaced populations and remote areas.

"Every child deserves protection from vaccine-preventable diseases, regardless of where they live or the challenges their families face in accessing health services," said Dr. Syed Jaffar Hussain, WHO Representative in Yemen.

Further reporting on El Niño's economic and humanitarian dimensions is collected in our impacts section.