Weak Monsoon and a Building El Niño Put India's Farm Supply Chain at Risk

India's farm economy depends on one input above all others: the timely arrival of the southwest monsoon. The rains usually reach the western coast around the start of June and then sweep across the country on a remarkably steady schedule, letting farmers plan sowing like clockwork. In 2026, that schedule has slipped. Rains reaching Mumbai have run close to two weeks late, and June, normally the main planting window for kharif (rainy-season) crops such as rice, cotton and millet, is ending with many fields still dry.

A monsoon shortfall acts on India's roughly $300 billion farm sector much like a missing part acts on a factory line: without the first showers, farmers cannot seed, and every delay pushes the whole calendar back. The worst of the dry spell has hit central India and the Deccan, a belt running through Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. This region grows the bulk of the country's soybean, sugarcane, cotton, peanuts and pulses, so a poor season here lifts prices in markets nationwide. In the onion-growing district of Nashik, rainfall this month has been only a small fraction of the long-term average, raising the risk of price spikes later in the year.

El Niño is a periodic warming of the surface waters of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Though it occurs far from India, it shifts global wind and rainfall patterns and is often linked to weaker Indian monsoons. A strong El Niño has now been declared and is expected to drive what could be the weakest monsoon in over a decade. It is unlikely to be the main reason the rains arrived late this year, but it threatens to deepen the dryness as the season goes on, leaving even late-sown crops to struggle in parched conditions.

The effects reach well beyond the fields. Thin harvests of cooking-oil crops, sugar, cotton and cheap protein such as pulses tend to push up food prices, and inflation is already running at its highest level in more than a year. The Reserve Bank of India has flagged this year's unusual weather as a risk to its economic outlook. To protect domestic supply, the government may again turn to trade curbs, as it has before with rice export bans, and similar limits on sugar are widely expected, steps that can ripple into global markets where India is a major supplier.

India is better cushioned today than in the past. Large stocks of rice and wheat sit in government warehouses, fertilizer stockpiles helped the country absorb earlier supply shocks, and the spread of irrigation, better seeds and stronger logistics have made the food system more resilient. Even so, these gains are racing against a warming climate that makes the monsoon less predictable and more prone to both drought and flooding. With a strong El Niño now building, the months ahead will test how far that resilience can stretch.