Between early 2025 and mid-2026, global commodity markets absorbed several shocks at once. Reuters reported that NOAA had declared the arrival of El Niño and put the probability of a very strong or 'super El Niño' heading into 2027. ¹ Bloomberg Línea separately reported NOAA's 61% probability of El Niño occurring between May and July 2026, up from 50%. ¹ These are different measures — one describes event strength heading into 2027, the other a specific 2026 window — and both can hold simultaneously.

Weather was not the only force in play. The IMF reported that oil prices rose 57.6% between August 2025 and March 2026, reaching $105.8 per barrel, attributing the move to military conflict in the Middle East. ¹ Reuters reported that the Iran war choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a route for about 30% of world trade in urea. ¹ On the demand side, KPMG reported China's Q3 2025 real estate investment growth fell to -19.2% from -12.1% in Q2, the largest drag on fixed-asset investment, and the Asian Development Bank reported China's commodity imports declined in 2025. ²

This report tests which of these forces the evidence actually supports as drivers of documented price movements. The central difficulty is that the strongest sources — the IMF, World Bank, USDA and ABARES — each document real effects pointing in different directions, often within a single publication.

The clearest, best-sourced price movements are in energy and metals. The IMF reported oil up 57.6% to $105.8 per barrel between August 2025 and March 2026, European TTF gas up 61%, and Asian LNG up 80.6% over the same window. ¹ The analyst's arithmetic confirms the oil figure internally: $105.8 divided by 1.576 implies an August 2025 base of roughly $67 per barrel, and the reverse check reproduces 57.6%. ¹ Copper hit records above $13,000 a ton on the London Metal Exchange in January 2026 per MINING.COM, a figure the International Aluminium Journal independently corroborates by reporting copper above $14,000 a ton in January and the LME base metal index closing 2025 with its largest annual gain since 2021 at 30.5%. ² These two independent origins converge on the record-above-$13,000 fact.

Agricultural prices did not move in one direction. The IMF reported cocoa prices dropped 57.4% as favorable weather in West Africa boosted supply, and coffee fell 9.9% after a record Brazilian harvest. ¹ This follows Reuters' documentation that cocoa had nearly tripled in 2024 and risen above $12,000 a ton by late 2024 — an independent origin describing the same surge-then-collapse arc. ² Morgan Stanley Investment Management, in an investment-marketing piece, reported that many agricultural markets entered a period of relative stability with strong harvests and adequate inventories, with wheat and corn supplies ample, leading to softer prices and modest declines in 2025. ¹

Attribution to weather specifically is weaker than the price data itself. Goldman Sachs, reported via AgFeed, projected a 15.8% rise in global agricultural commodity prices due to El Niño, with rice, palm oil, sugar and coffee potentially rising 50% to 100% or more — a projection graded SPECULATIVE. ¹ The IMF's contemporaneous documentation that coffee actually fell 9.9% sits directly against Goldman's projection of coffee rising sharply, a tension the reader should weigh given that Goldman's business includes commodity trading and client positioning. ² The spot-price picture for early 2026 is the thinnest part of the record: Al Fardan Exchange, a single T3 corporate source, reported WTI near $57 per barrel and gold above $4,400 per ounce, both UNVERIFIED. ¹ The $57 WTI figure diverges sharply from the IMF's $105.8; the analyst notes possible explanations within the sources — different benchmarks or dates within 'early 2026' — but treats the IMF's CONFIRMED figure as authoritative. ²

Open: What were independently verified spot prices for WTI crude and gold in the first quarter of 2026?; What was the net global — as opposed to regional — change in cereal and oilseed prices across the full period?

The supply-disruption evidence is strong and largely from T1 authoritative sources. ABARES, the official Australian forecaster, reported wheat production forecast to fall 26% to 26.7 million tonnes in 2026-27, 23% below the five-year average and 8% below the ten-year average. ¹ The analyst's reverse arithmetic confirms internal consistency: 26.7 divided by 0.74 implies a prior-year figure near 36.1 million tonnes, reproducing the 26% decline. ¹ Kpler, citing ABARES, separately reported a 12% year-on-year decline in wheat area. ¹ These two figures are convergent: an area decline of 12% alongside a production decline of 26% is consistent with yield pressure from drought, which Reuters documented directly in reporting that NSW and Queensland farmers scaled back wheat and canola planting after months of low rainfall. ³ The USDA reported France corn production for MY 2026/27 at 10.0 million tonnes, down 26% and the lowest since MY 1990/91, explicitly citing drought and record heat; the analyst's check confirms the 26% figure against an implied 13.5-million-tonne prior year. ¹

Weather also produced record output. The same USDA report that documented France's collapse recorded Argentina's corn production for MY 2025/26 at a record 63.0 million tonnes, up 29% year on year — the analyst confirms this against an implied 48.8-million-tonne base. ¹ The USDA also reported Indonesia's MY 2024/25 palm oil production at 45.5 million tonnes, revised down 1% due to adverse late-season rains. ¹ Know Your Commodity, a single T3 LinkedIn source, reported that August-September 2025 rains left 2.75% of India's cropped area severely damaged and 5% partly affected. ¹

Energy production faced a distinct, physical weather constraint. Ember reported at least 7 GW of French nuclear capacity forced offline July 1-2, 2025, with the heatwave potentially impacting up to 15% of France's nuclear capacity; Balkan Green Energy News independently corroborated the up-to-15% impact, and the two origins agree on timing and magnitude. ¹ In the same month, Ember reported June 2025 was the highest EU solar production month on record at 45 TWh, up 22% from June 2024 — a figure corroborated exactly by a second independent source. ¹ Metals disruptions were largely non-weather: the IMF attributed copper's 29.5% surge and aluminum's 29.8% rise to mining accidents in Chile and Indonesia and to smelter shutdowns, and AuAg Funds reported a landslide at the Grasberg mine in Indonesia halting production until mid-2026. ²

Open: Do official Indian agriculture ministry figures confirm the 2.75%/5% crop-damage estimates?; What was the net global change in corn and wheat supply once regional surpluses and shortfalls are aggregated?

This is the inconvenient question, and the authoritative record answers against weather primacy for the period's largest moves. The two biggest documented price surges — oil up 57.6% and gas up 61-80.6% — were attributed by the IMF explicitly to Middle East military conflict. ¹ The World Bank projected energy prices to surge 24% in 2026 to their highest level since 2022, also driven by the Middle East war. ¹ This matters because energy is upstream of agriculture: Reuters reported the Iran war choked Hormuz, a route for about 30% of world urea trade, and CaixaBank Research reported that the Hormuz blockade drove a surge in energy, fuel, fertiliser and aluminium prices, causing a global rise in inflation. ²

CaixaBank's framing warrants a note on both incentive and language. CaixaBank Research is a banking-sector unit whose inflation narrative supports its projection that the ECB will raise rates to 2.50% in 2026 versus a pre-conflict expectation of stable rates at 2.00% — a projection graded SPECULATIVE. ¹ Its description of a 'blockade' that 'choked' traffic sits against Al Fardan Exchange's report of 'limited near-term supply disruption' with WTI near $57 per barrel, though the latter is a single UNVERIFIED source. ² The tension is real but unresolved on the available evidence.

Demand-side forces cut against a pure supply-shock reading in any direction. KPMG reported China's Q3 2025 real estate investment growth deteriorated to -19.2% from -12.1% in Q2 — a 7.1-percentage-point swing the analyst confirms — described as the largest drag on fixed-asset investment. ¹ The ADB reported China's commodity imports declined in 2025, offset by increased semiconductor imports. ¹ Al Fardan Exchange reported the USD Index slipped toward 98.2 in early 2026, its steepest annual decline in eight years, a currency effect on dollar-denominated commodity pricing. ¹ The evidence for weather primacy fails a basic test: if weather were the dominant global driver, we would not expect the largest surges to carry explicit conflict attribution from the IMF and World Bank, nor would we expect major agricultural commodities to fall on favorable weather in the same window. ²

Open: What decomposition separates the geopolitical risk premium in oil and gas from underlying supply fundamentals?; How much of the 2026 USD Index decline reflected monetary policy versus commodity terms-of-trade effects?

The evidence on trader and futures-market response is thin — the weakest coverage in this investigation. CME Group reported that Chicago Wheat futures volume rose 14.9% year-on-year to 4,045,978 contracts in February 2026, while Soybean futures volume rose 38.7% year-on-year to 8,514,278 contracts. ¹ Rising volume in both contracts is consistent with heightened hedging and speculative activity during a period of supply uncertainty, but volume alone does not reveal direction, positioning, or strategy.

Beyond this single official exchange dataset, the record contains no evidence on trading-house positioning, futures curve structure, or documented trading strategies. This is a material gap: the brief asked how traders actually responded, and the available claims answer only that participation rose in two grain contracts. ¹ Derivatives exchanges have a documented interest in trading-volume growth, which colors — though does not invalidate — the framing of a volume surge as market recognition of volatility. ¹

Open: What did commercial and speculative net positioning in wheat, corn and energy futures show through the period?; How did major trading houses and physical merchants adjust hedging strategy in response to the documented shocks?

H1 holds that weather shocks directly caused the documented price surges through supply disruption. The evidence supports this for specific agricultural and energy cases: ABARES on Australian wheat, USDA on French corn with explicit drought-and-heat attribution, and Ember on heatwave-forced nuclear outages. ³ If H1 were the whole story, we would expect broad weather-driven price increases across the commodity complex. The record contradicts that expectation: the IMF documents cocoa down 57.4% and coffee down 9.9% on favorable weather, and USDA records Argentina's record corn harvest. ² H1 is supported as a sector- and region-specific mechanism, not as a global explanation.

H2 holds that geopolitical shocks — the Middle East war and Hormuz — dominated. This is the best-supported hypothesis for the period's largest moves. The IMF attributed oil's 57.6% rise and gas's 61-80.6% rise to the conflict, the World Bank projected a 24% energy surge on the same cause, and Reuters documented Hormuz's 30% share of urea trade. ³ If H2 were the whole story, weather-driven agricultural declines in non-conflict zones would not appear — yet France's corn collapse and Australia's wheat shortfall carry explicit weather attribution unrelated to Hormuz. ² H2 explains energy; it does not explain grains or metals.

H3 holds that monetary policy and currency shifts were primary. This rests on only two claims — CaixaBank's SPECULATIVE ECB projection and Al Fardan's REPORTED USD Index observation — and the analyst rates it merely plausible. ² There is no decomposition in the record isolating a monetary channel, so H3 cannot be elevated above a contributing factor.

H4 holds that regional heterogeneity is the accurate frame: weather created winners and losers rather than a uniform shock. This is the hypothesis the evidence most consistently supports. The same USDA report contains both France's collapse and Argentina's record; the same IMF report contains both conflict-driven energy increases and weather-driven agricultural decreases; and metals moved on mining accidents and smelter shutdowns rather than climate. ² If the market had experienced a single unified driver, contradictory movements within identical sources and periods would not appear. They do. The most defensible reading is multi-causal and regionally divergent, with H2 dominant in energy, H1 operative in specific farm and power cases, and H4 as the organizing frame across the whole.

The evidence forces a narrower conclusion than the framing 'weather rattled commodity markets' implies. Weather demonstrably rattled specific markets: Australian wheat was forecast down 26%, French corn fell to its lowest since 1990, and French nuclear capacity was physically forced offline by heat. ³ These are CONFIRMED or well-corroborated, and their weather attribution is explicit in T1 sources. On these, the report states the finding plainly.

But the evidence does not support weather as the primary global price driver, and on this the wording must be firm because the sources are authoritative and consistent. The largest surges — oil and gas — carry conflict attribution from the IMF and World Bank. ² Within the same IMF report cited for energy, weather pushed cocoa and coffee sharply lower. ¹ Metals rose on mining accidents. ¹ Any narrative — whether weather-primacy or geopolitical-primacy — that foregrounds one directional set of moves while stripping out contradictory data from the identical source and period is selecting evidence rather than weighing it.

Where the evidence is genuinely open, the report says so. The monetary-policy channel (H3) rests on two weak claims and cannot be ranked. ² The trader-response question is largely unanswered beyond CME volume data. ¹ Early-2026 spot prices for oil and gold rest on a single UNVERIFIED source and remain unconfirmed. ¹ As a labeled SPECULATIVE observation: if the divergent pattern documented here persists, the reasoning suggests future 'weather shock' commodity narratives will systematically overstate price effects wherever favorable weather in exporting regions offsets losses elsewhere — a hypothesis the Argentina-versus-France contrast within one USDA report already illustrates, but which the current evidence cannot confirm as a general rule. ¹