El Niño and fresh produce shipping: what it changes for importers

El Niño reaches a produce importer twice, and usually in the same weeks. It changes what your growers have to sell: volumes, sizing, and when each harvest window opens and closes. It also changes how that fruit reaches you, because the same warm Pacific that moved the harvest drains the lake that runs the Panama Canal. Most importers meet these as two separate problems — a supplier’s email about a late start, and a carrier advisory about transit slots. They have one cause, and they arrive together.

That double exposure is what makes El Niño different from an ordinary disruption. A strike, a blanked sailing or a congested berth hits the transport side alone, and your fruit still has the life it had when it was cut. Here both ends move at once.

It is also not only a South American story, which is how it usually gets written up. The same episode dries out banana farms in the southern Philippines, floods the roads to the port in Kenya, and leaves the Mediterranean more or less alone. Whatever your book of origins looks like, most of it sits somewhere on that map.

What El Niño is, and why it reaches so far #

El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It is a spell in which surface water across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific runs unusually warm. The eastern end of that ocean is the water off Peru, so this is not a distant phenomenon for our trade. Peruvian fishermen gave it the name, after the Christ child, because it tended to appear around Christmas. NOAA publishes the current state and the forecast; we will not restate it here.

What turns an ocean temperature into your problem is where the rain goes. Tropical rainfall sits over the warmest water. When that warm water shifts east, the rain goes with it — away from Indonesia and the Philippines, towards the open Pacific and the coast of South America. The atmosphere then carries the change much further out, into Australia, southern Africa, East Africa and North America. Meteorologists call those long-distance effects teleconnections. For an importer the useful part is simpler: one episode is a drought at some of your origins and a flood at others, in the same months.

The timing is the second useful part. ENSO swings irregularly between its warm and cool phases every two to seven years. An episode usually runs nine to twelve months, builds through the northern spring, and reaches full strength around December. December is also when the Southern Hemisphere export season carries its heaviest load: Chilean cherries running into Chinese New Year, table grapes in volume, Peruvian blueberries at their peak. The phenomenon peaks on top of your peak.

The cool phase, La Niña, reverses much of what follows and brings its own set of problems, and this page is not about it. What follows is a pattern that recurs, not a forecast for any one year.

The harvest side: one phenomenon, opposite weather #

El Niño is not bad weather everywhere at once, and reading it that way will cost you money in both directions. It moves rain rather than removing it. Some of your origins get the rain, some lose it, and a few are barely touched.

The eastern Pacific: heat and rain in the wrong months #

On the Pacific coast of South America the warm phase arrives as heat, and the damage is done long before anyone thinks about a booking.

Peru’s export growing regions — Piura, La Libertad, Lambayeque, Ica — feel it mostly as unusually warm winter nights. Blueberry bushes need cool nights to accumulate chilling hours before they set flower. Take the cool nights away and the bush puts out leaf instead of fruit. That is what happened in the 2023–24 campaign. Varieties such as Ventura aborted flowering in favour of vegetative growth, the season started late, and mid-campaign shipments were running at roughly half the previous year’s volume.

Chile gets the opposite weather and the same trouble. In the warm phase central Chile tends towards a wetter winter and spring. Recent episodes have pushed that rain further south, over O'Higgins and Maule, which is the heart of the cherry belt. Rain close to harvest in November and December splits cherries. Rain during flowering raises the risk of botrytis — grey mould — on table grapes. Neither shows up first as a tonnage problem. It shows up in the pack-out, which is the share of the crop that makes export grade. You get more small sizes, more fruit sold at home, and less of the grade your programme was written around.

Ecuador shows the same weather doing something different, because Ecuador has almost no harvest window to move. Bananas ship every week of the year against standing programmes. So a warm, wet episode lands there as disease pressure rather than as a late start. Black sigatoka — the leaf fungus Ecuadorian growers spray against all year — spreads faster in warm wet air. The rest of it lands on the road between the farm and Guayaquil, which we come back to below.

The western Pacific and South Asia: the dry half #

The rain that leaves Indonesia and the Philippines during an episode has to leave something behind, and what it leaves is drought. This half of the map carries the biggest volumes, and gets the least attention in European trade press.

Almost all Philippine export bananas are Cavendish grown in Mindanao, and almost all of them are sold to Japanese, Korean and Chinese buyers rather than European ones. A long dry spell there does not kill the plantation. It reduces bunch weight and it shrinks fruit, so the volume that makes export grade falls while the plants stay alive. A buyer in Hong Kong meets that as a short allocation rather than as a cancelled season.

Thailand and Vietnam feel it through durian, which is the crop that sets both calendars. Durian flowers after a dry spell and then needs water to size the fruit. A dry season that runs too long delays flowering and leaves small fruit behind it, and small durian is a different product at a different price. In the Mekong Delta there is a second mechanism: when the river runs low, seawater pushes further inland, which growers call saline intrusion. It has damaged dragon fruit and durian orchards in the worst episodes.

India is on the same side of the map, and there the risk is not only agronomic. An El Niño year raises the odds of a below-normal southwest monsoon. That thins the crop, and a thin crop invites the government to protect the domestic market — export duties, minimum prices, or an outright ban. Onions are the standing example. A European buyer works Nashik table grapes from January to April. The lesson there is the same: weather risk at this origin can arrive as a policy announcement, with no notice at all.

Australia’s eastern states dry out in the same episodes, and the link between the two is one of the strongest anywhere. It reaches an importer as thinner citrus and table grape volumes out of the Murray valleys into Asia, in the Northern Hemisphere summer rather than in December.

The origins it spares, and the ones where nobody should blame it #

Knowing where El Niño does not reliably reach is worth as much as knowing where it does.

South Africa is the case people most often get wrong. The dry effect there falls on the summer-rainfall interior, which is why an El Niño year is a maize story in the South African press. Most of the export fruit sits elsewhere: irrigated citrus in Limpopo and the Eastern Cape, table grapes and stone fruit in the winter-rainfall Western Cape. So the fruit calendar is less exposed than the headlines suggest. The more reliable South African risk stays what it always was: wind days at Cape Town, and congestion at Durban.

Kenya sits on the other side of it. East Africa’s short rains, from October to December, tend to come in heavier during an episode, and 2023 ended in serious flooding. Avocados here are a smallholder crop, aggregated from tens of thousands of farms. The exposure is therefore less the orchard than the collection: wet roads, delayed intake, and fruit that waits longer before it is cooled.

Central America dries. Costa Rica ships pineapples every week of the year. A dry spell there shows up as size and yield rather than as a window that moves. It is also the same weather the canal depends on, a few hundred kilometres down the isthmus. Mexico usually gets a wetter northern winter, which is good for reservoirs and bad for anyone harvesting through it.

Two origins are close to unaffected, for opposite reasons. In Brazil, the São Francisco valley grows mangoes and table grapes under irrigation. Pruning sets that harvest rather than rainfall, which makes it about as insulated as a tropical origin gets. And El Niño has no reliable effect on the Mediterranean at all: Spain and Morocco have their own droughts and their own bad winters, and they are not this. If a supplier there explains a short week with El Niño, the explanation is somewhere else.

What this means for a book of contracts #

The practical consequence is volatility in both directions, not simply shortage. A short crop is not a cheap crop. Peru’s blueberry export value rose in 2023 even as volume fell, because everyone was chasing the same fruit. The following season set a record and the price went the other way. Growers adapt too: after 2023–24 the Peruvian industry replanted heavily with low-chill varieties. So a bad year is a bad year rather than a new normal.

It also means your spread of origins is not the hedge you might think. It is not useless either. Because the phenomenon is one system, it hits Mindanao and Piura in the same months. You cannot wait it out at another origin in the same quarter. Because its effects point in opposite directions, the same episode that thins one book of contracts leaves another alone. What it exposes in every case is the standing programme, signed on last season’s volumes, which cannot bend to either outcome.

The transport side: the canal, the coast and the storm tracks #

The Panama Canal #

The Panama Canal is not a cut at sea level. It lifts a ship roughly 26 metres up into Gatún Lake and lowers it down the far side, and every transit spends fresh water out of that lake. The canal’s capacity is therefore a rainfall figure, and the warm phase suppresses rainfall over its watershed. That is the recurring mechanism, and it is the one to plan against. The numbers below illustrate it with one episode.

In late 2023 the Panama Canal Authority cut booking slots from the usual mid-thirties a day to 22 in December and 20 in January. It also reduced the maximum draught — how deep a loaded hull may sit — from 50 feet to 44. A ship that cannot sit as deep carries fewer boxes. A ship without a slot waits, buys one at auction, or takes another route.

For Pacific South American produce this is not one risk among many. It is the lane. Peru to Rotterdam, Chile to Rotterdam and Chile to the UK all depend on that transit. Every alternative is paid for in days. One is the long way south, around the tip of the continent through the Strait of Magellan. The other is a transshipment, which adds a connection you can miss. Days are what your cargo has least of, which is the whole argument of transit time is shelf life.

The canal matters even if none of your fruit goes through it. Ships that queue or reroute are ships not arriving where the schedule said, on services that have nothing to do with produce. The round trip lengthens, capacity comes out of the network, and the boxes are somewhere else. That reaches an Asian or African origin as a thinner schedule, weeks after the drought that caused it.

Ports and roads #

The coast itself is the second transport problem, and it is less famous than the canal. Peru’s ports close to swell by order of the port captaincy, Callao and Paita among them, and a disturbed Pacific produces more of those closures. A closure does not cancel a sailing; it moves it. The fruit was cut for the old sailing and does not wait.

Rain does the same thing further inland, where there is no advisory to read. Flooding cuts the road from the farm to the port, and a truck that cannot reach Guayaquil or Mombasa has the same effect on your container as a closed berth. The 2017 flooding on the northern Peruvian coast came from a coastal El Niño — a warming confined to that shoreline. The wider Pacific was in no El Niño at all, so an ordinary year out in the ocean can still be a bad year on that coast.

Storm tracks #

El Niño also moves tropical storms, and this is the one place where it does an importer a favour. A warm equatorial Pacific increases wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. Shear is wind that changes direction with height, and it pulls a forming storm apart before it can organise. That tends to suppress the Atlantic hurricane season, and Caribbean, Gulf and US East Coast lanes get a quieter autumn.

The same episode makes the eastern Pacific busier, which is the water off Mexico’s container ports at Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas. In the western Pacific, storms tend to form further east and last longer on the way in. So the typhoon risk to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Pearl River Delta changes in shape rather than simply in count. For a Southeast Asian shipper the practical form of this is port closure days in the peak durian months.

The cargo itself: warmer air at both ends #

There is a third effect that is easy to miss because it never appears in an advisory. A hot origin loads hotter fruit. Field heat is higher, cold rooms work harder, and pulp temperature at stuffing is more likely to be above where it should be. A reefer is built to hold a temperature, not to pull one down, so fruit that goes in warm spends part of the voyage getting cold instead of staying cold.

You pay for that at the far end. Every degree-day spent above the setpoint is quality life you cannot get back, and it is spent before the vessel sails. In an episode where the transit is also longer, the two subtractions land on the same container.

Where the two channels meet: boxes #

Both channels push the same way on equipment, which is why they compound rather than simply add.

Reefer supply at an origin is a repositioning schedule, and that schedule was built on last year’s calendar. Move the harvest three weeks and lengthen the transits in the same season, and the empty boxes end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ones that should be back in Callao for the peak are still on the water. The shortage lands in the exact weeks you need equipment most, and a shortage in peak weeks is where a booking becomes a rollover. That mechanism has its own page — see reefer shortages — and El Niño pulls both of its levers at once.

The part you can influence #

You cannot argue with a drought or reschedule a harvest. What is genuinely within reach is how early you know.

A canal restriction announced in November is a fact about your December commitments while there is still time to change them. You can shorten the programme, hold back a delivery, or put the fruit with the least life in hand onto the shortest routing. The same restriction found when the vessel is already queuing is a set of promises you cannot keep. That gap is what Trackberry is for: it tells you which of your containers are on a slipping routing on the day it slips.

FAQ #

Which origins does El Niño affect? #

Most of them, but not in the same direction. The Pacific coast of South America gets heat and rain out of season — warm nights in Peru, wet springs in Chile. The western Pacific and South Asia get drought: the southern Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India and eastern Australia. East Africa gets heavier short rains and flooding. Central America dries. Southern Africa’s drought falls mostly on field crops rather than on export fruit, and the Mediterranean has no reliable connection to it at all.

Does El Niño affect the Panama Canal? #

Yes, through rainfall. The canal lifts ships into Gatún Lake and spends fresh water on every transit. Its capacity therefore depends on rain over the watershed, and El Niño suppresses that rain. In dry episodes the canal authority reduces daily transit slots and lowers the maximum draught, so vessels queue, load lighter, or route around. For Pacific-coast produce lanes into Europe and the US East Coast, that is felt as added days rather than added freight cost.

How often does El Niño happen, and how long does it last? #

ENSO swings between its warm and cool phases irregularly, every two to seven years. An El Niño episode typically lasts nine to twelve months, though some have run considerably longer. Episodes usually build through the northern spring and reach full strength around December — which is also the peak of the Southern Hemisphere export season.

Should I book earlier in an El Niño year? #

Earlier helps, but the more useful change is deciding what to make firm. The window at origin can move by weeks, and the transit can lengthen mid-season. So the fixed part of your plan should be the equipment and the slot, not the delivery you promised your customer. Treat a moving ETA as information you act on rather than noise, and re-sequence customers so the fruit with least life left goes to the nearest one.