"World Bank: Food Prices Will Rise 18% by 2027 as War, Shipping Shocks and El Niño Collide"

The World Bank's latest Commodity Markets Outlook, released on 28 October, reads less like a forecast than like a warning label. Commodity prices are set to rise 23% in 2026, it says, driven by a Middle East conflict that has drained oil inventories, disrupted grain shipments in the Black Sea, and pushed energy prices to a four-year high. The headline number is striking, but the figure that matters most to ordinary households is smaller and slower-moving: food commodity prices are expected to rise about 10% in 2026 and another 7% in 2027, a cumulative increase of 18% over two years.

That is not a spike that comes and goes with a single harvest. It is a grind. Three forces are compounding, and each one feeds the next. The conflict disrupts grain shipments and draws down oil stocks, which raises fuel and transport costs. Fertilizer prices, which jumped with an early-year surge in urea, are set to rise 14% in 2026, which raises the cost of growing the next crop before it is even planted. And on top of both sits the weather: the Bank warns of a very strong El Niño, with forecasts pointing to the worst such event since 1950, threatening harvests in exactly the regions that can least afford a bad year.

The report is unusually candid about what could make it worse. Its forecasts assume no major intensification of the conflicts affecting commodity supplies. If the Middle East conflict escalates and damage to Russia's oil infrastructure persists, energy prices rise further; if attacks on Black Sea grain shipments combine with that strong El Niño, the Bank sketches an adverse scenario in which Brent averages $105 a barrel in 2027 and food commodity prices run 12% higher than the baseline forecast, surpassing their 2022 level. The early 2010s are invoked explicitly as the comparison: a food crisis that pushes more people into extreme poverty. This is the part of the report worth reading twice, because the baseline already assumes things go roughly as they are going now.

The energy numbers frame the food story. Energy prices are projected to rise 32% in 2026, reversing three years of declines, before moderating in 2027. Brent is forecast to average $91 per barrel in 2026, up from $69 in 2025, then ease to $79 in 2027. Global oil supply is projected to fall 5.2% in 2026, the largest drop in more than four decades outside the 2020 recession, while consumption is expected to decline 2.5%, the third-largest annual contraction on record. High prices are curbing demand, and electrification, particularly in China, is reducing oil use — but production remains below consumption, so stocks keep being drawn down and the market stays exposed to the next shock.

<div class="stat-strip">
<div><strong>+23%</strong><span>Overall commodity prices, 2026</span></div>
<div><strong>+32%</strong><span>Energy prices, 2026</span></div>
<div><strong>+18%</strong><span>Food prices, 2026–27 cumulative</span></div>
<div><strong>$91</strong><span>Brent average, 2026 ($/barrel)</span></div>
</div>

What I find most instructive is the report's special focus on how commodity markets transmit shocks to each other. Links between commodity-price volatility become more pronounced during periods of economic or market stress, including since the start of the current Middle East conflict, and industrial metals transmit the most volatility to other commodity groups on average, though oil's role has risen markedly since the conflict began. In plain terms: a shock that starts in one market no longer stays there. An oil disruption becomes a fertilizer price, which becomes a food price, which becomes an inflation number, which becomes a monetary policy decision. The Bank's own prescription follows from that chain — $50 billion to $60 billion made available through existing instruments, including $25 billion in pre-arranged financing, to support social safety nets, fiscal capacity, and working capital for firms and farms.

My own judgement, and the prediction attached to this article, is deliberately set below the Bank's baseline rather than above it. An 18% cumulative rise over two years is a forecast, not a fact, and forecasts of this kind have a long record of being overtaken by the very shocks they warn about — in either direction. Demand destruction is already visible in the oil numbers, fertilizer prices are expected to return to 2025 levels in 2027, and a strong El Niño is a forecast, not yet a harvest failure. But the balance of risks in this report leans one way: the adverse scenario is worse than the baseline by a wide margin, while the benign path requires several things to go right at once. Food is where a global shock becomes a household fact, and this report suggests households should expect that fact to get more expensive for two years, not one.

Sources: World Bank, "Commodity Prices Set to Increase by 23% in 2026 as Global Shocks Mount" (28 October 2026); Reuters, "World Bank sees commodity prices up 23% in 2026 due to Middle East war, other shocks" (28 October 2026).