A recent CNN story claims that climate change has caused recent disruptions in food production across the Caribbean and South America. This is false. Although in Latin America as elsewhere farm production varies from year to year and weather in 2023 did bring hardship to some farmers in some countries, since 1990 overall crop production in the region has regularly set records. Despite being a period during which the Earth warmed modestly, improving supplies of major crops resulted in a decline in hunger. With no sustained decrease in production and no long-term trend, it is simply false to claim climate change is harming food production in Latin America.
The CNN story, “Climate change is disrupting food systems across Latin America, UN report says,” cites a recent U.N. report, “Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2024,” to claim:
Violent weather exacerbated by climate change fueled hunger and food insecurity across Latin America and the Caribbean in 2023, according to a new United Nations report.
Extreme weather drove up crop prices in multiple countries in the region in 2023, the report, which was written by several UN agencies including the World Food Program (WFP), says.
To begin, extreme weather affecting crop prices in 2023, or in any other year, is not unusual, ask any farmer. Extreme weather is not unusual across Latin America or elsewhere. Every year, extreme weather strikes somewhere at some time. When it does, it can hamper planting, tending, harvesting, and/or transporting crops, complicating getting crops from field to market. As my colleague award winning meteorologist Anthony Watts and I have discussed at Climate Realism many times previously, here, here, and here, for example, the World Meteorological Organization is clear that weather is not climate. Only long-term weather trends can signify a change in climate, and there has been no sustained, multi-decade or even multi-year trend of more frequent or more severe weather events across the Caribbean or South American.
While there is no evidence climate change impacted Latin American agriculture in 2023, El Niño, a natural large scale oceanic shift, almost certainly did drive multiple severe weather events across the region. El Niño results in shifting weather patterns, like excessive rainfall in some areas, causing flooding, and less rainfall in others, causing drought. It can also impact the formation of hurricanes, their strength, and where they are likely to strike, and contribute to conditions favorable or disfavorable to wildfires. There is no evidence at all that climate change is affecting El Niño/La Niña oceanic shifts.
The strongest evidence rebutting claims that climate change is “disrupting food systems across Latin America,” as CNN asserts, comes directly from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which assembles data on food production. FAO data show that between 1990 and 2025, the most important crops grown in the Caribbean, and in Central and South America, cereal crops (maize, rice, wheat, oats, barley, rye, etc.) and tubers and roots (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, manioc (cassava), carrots, beats, etc.) have all set records for production repeatedly over the period.
- Cereal grain production grew approximately 44 percent across Central America, 18 percent in the Caribbean, and 275 percent across South America;
- Tuber and root production expanded by about 91 percent in Central America, 52 percent across the Caribbean, and by 6 percent in South America. (See the figure below)
Facts are facts and while CNN and the U.N. may try to spin a single year’s food disruption for some farmers in some countries into evidence of a regionwide climate crisis, the data tells a different story. Amid ongoing modest warming, while some farmers, in some countries, in some years, have down years, and transportation may be made difficult due to storms, overall in Latin America food production is increasing. Farmers and agricultural areas across the region are doing well. There is no evidence, none whatsoever, that climate change is disrupting the food supply or causing hunger or malnutrition in Latin America.
