Global food inflation is running at 2.8% right now. JPMorgan’s economists expect it to hit 5% by the first half of 2027, and they don’t expect it to fade quickly after that. The bank’s new report, Food Security Is National Security: A Compounding Storm, landed this week and ZeroHedge covered it on Sunday. The line that stuck with me came from the economist who led it, Nora Szentivanyi: “Successive shocks since COVID have compounded, eroding food production capacity and keeping food price pressures elevated into 2027.” I haven’t read the full report, it sits behind an institutional desk, but the numbers in the coverage match what the UN’s food price index has been doing. That index hit a three year high in July.
Five Ws And A Lag
JPMorgan hangs the whole thing on what it calls the Five Ws: War, Weather, Warehousing, Water and Waste. War is still choking shipping and fertiliser out of the Gulf. Weather is the Super El Nino building over the Pacific. Warehousing is China quietly stockpiling food and fertiliser while the West holds oil reserves and not much else. You get the idea. None of it is news on its own. What’s new is a date. The bank reckons crop and price effects lag the El Nino peak by 6 to 12 months, which is why they put the worst of the squeeze in the first half of 2027, not next month.
I wrote about the Schroders version of this warning back in July, when their modelling said advanced economy food prices could double. Now a second major bank has walked up to the same door and knocked. When one desk says it, it’s a headline. When they queue up, I start counting backwards on the calendar.
Count Backwards From Mid 2027
Here’s the counting. Spring planting in Australia starts in about two weeks. A tomato seedling that goes in during September is picking from December. Capsicum planted in October fruits right through autumn. Garlic that goes into a cool zone bed next autumn comes out in late 2027. Every one of those harvest windows lands inside the stretch JPMorgan just circled. The veggies you plant this spring are the exact ones on your bench when the 5% number is supposed to be showing up on shelf tags. That’s not a panic. That’s just a planting calendar doing its job.
And the squeeze doesn’t route through your backyard. I made this point in July and it still holds: a bed of silverbeet pays no freight, buys no urea by the tonne, and carries no shipping insurance. The whole price chain the report describes runs through the shop shelf. Your soil isn’t on the route.
What I’d Put In This Spring
I checked yesterday’s Brisbane shelf prices before writing this, so let the numbers pick the crops. Snow peas are sitting at $17.96/kg at Aldi and $22 at Coles. They’re one of the easiest spring plantings there is, a packet of seed and something to climb. Capsicum is $5.99 to $7.90/kg and a couple of plants will feed a household from summer into May. Cucumber runs $5.99 at Aldi up to $13.80 at Woolworths for the fancy ones, and one healthy vine embarrasses that price by Christmas. Garlic is still $29.99 to $33.01/kg, and if you’re in a cool or temperate zone the planting window for that has passed for this year, so put it in the plan for next autumn rather than forcing it now.
Just as important is what I wouldn’t bother with. Onions are $2/kg at Coles this week. No bed of mine is earning $2/kg. Sweet potato at $3.99 is marginal unless you’ve got space going spare in a warm zone. Growing your own only beats the shops when the shops are dear, which is exactly why the dear list is where your spring beds should point.
Two Weeks To Get Organised
The Plant Now page shows what’s worth starting this month in each of the seven Australian climate zones, matched against the live price tracker. Both are free to look at. If you want the longer game, a Garden Buddy account gives you the My Garden planner, and that’s the tool for exactly this situation: you tell it your beds and your zone, it tells you what to plant in September and what each bed is likely worth at current prices. When I filled the planner in properly back in July, one garlic bed alone came out at $2,955 of harvest at shelf prices. That was before a second bank started warning those shelf prices are heading up. If JPMorgan is right, the gardeners who spend the next two weeks planning are the ones who’ll read the 2027 grocery headlines with a cuppa and not much else.
The banks watch the Strait of Hormuz. I watch the price of snow peas. One of us can do something about it with a packet of seeds.
