World News in Brief: El Niño’s $11 trillion price tag, Mozambique and Yemen updates

A woman works in a small banana planation in Uganda.

The El Niño extreme weather pattern could cost the global economy up to $11 trillion and seriously impact food security, said the UN agency tackling rural poverty in developing countries on Monday.

The new IFAD report identifies El Niño as one of several overlapping climate and economic shocks affecting small-scale food producers and rural economies, warning that agricultural disruptions can ripple through the wider economy.

In 2026 alone, global energy and fertiliser shocks drove up costs across food systems within a single planting season – from production and processing to transport and distribution.

To strengthen rural economies’ resilience to overlapping shocks, the report calls for bundled investments that help farmers access markets, agricultural inputs, technologies, and financial services, including credit and weather insurance.

“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.

IFAD modelling shows that combining these measures is nearly twice as effective at protecting farm incomes when drought and price shocks strike simultaneously.

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