Agribonds Will Continue to Do Well: The 2021 Call, & What Five Years of Data Have Since Confirmed

Climate change will cause a profound impact on our food security.  Agricultural areas face direct risk from temperature shifts.  Changes in ocean currents and temperatures will disrupt fishing and fisheries.  Desertification threatens many regions outright.  Putting food on the table will cost more, even as quality grows less consistent.  Agricultural commodity markets, meanwhile, stand to benefit precisely because scarcity raises the price of what remains.

The 2020 bull run was not a fluke.  It was a preview.  In 2020, agricultural commodities staged a rally that defied every reasonable expectation set by a global pandemic.  People still need to eat during an epidemic.  People confined to their homes eat more, not less.  Coffee and cocoa did suffer, but grains and oilseeds reached multi-year highs, and even commodities tied to energy demand and GDP growth, palm oil and sugar among them, performed strongly despite the broader economic collapse around them.

The mechanism was speculative capital chasing scarcity, and the data on this is unambiguous.  Speculators bought record volumes of agricultural futures in 2020, feeding the price rise directly.  Fiscal and monetary stimulus pushed sovereign bond yields down, driving capital out of government debt and into alternative assets, agricultural commodities among the most attractive.  China’s own appetite compounded the effect.  China imported a record 11.3 million metric tonnes of corn in 2020 and a record 98.5 million metric tonnes of soybeans the same year, according to General Administration of Customs data, driven substantially by the need to rebuild its hog population after African swine fever devastated it.  Global corn prices climbed above US$6 a bushel in response, a near eight-year high at the time.

This is where the original contention gets tested against reality, and reality confirmed it emphatically.  Between March 2020 and March 2022, the International Grains Council’s Grains and Oilseeds Index surged 88%, driven by strong Chinese import demand, smaller world supplies following Northern Hemisphere droughts in the summer of 2021, tightening exporter stocks, and rising energy and fertiliser costs, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 then amplified an already tightening market, since Ukraine and Russia are major exporters of wheat, corn, barley, and sunflower oil, and the war disrupted those exports directly.  The scramble for food security the original analysis predicted did not merely continue.  It escalated into the largest agricultural price shock in a generation.

The pattern has not disappeared.  It has simply changed its immediate driver.  Grain prices did retreat from their 2022 peaks as record wheat and corn production, particularly out of Brazil and the United States, rebuilt global supply cushions through the 2023 and 2024 marketing years.  But China’s demand has not gone away.  As of late 2025, China committed to purchasing 25 million metric tonnes of soybeans through 2028, alongside a broader US$17 billion agricultural buying package, and by mid-November 2025, soybean futures were touching seventeen-month highs on exactly the combination the 2021 analysis flagged: fund buying, yield concerns, and confirmed Chinese export demand.  Wheat, corn, and soybean futures continued climbing into 2026 on weather concerns and renewed Chinese purchasing, according to multiple market analyses through that period.

Food security remains the operative variable, not speculation, and the distinction matters.  Speculation inflates prices in bursts and produces temporary bubbles that correct once positioning unwinds.  Structural scarcity, driven by climate change, worsening La Niña cycles, and nations competing to secure adequate wheat, corn, and soybean supplies for their own populations, does not correct.  It compounds.  Five years on from the original 2021 call, the data confirms exactly that distinction played out as described: the speculative spike of 2020 to 2022 has partially unwound, while the underlying scramble for food security, visible in China’s continued record purchasing through 2025 and 2026, has not gone anywhere.  The long-term trend was never about a single bull run.  It was about a structural direction, and the structural direction has not changed.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith & Red Sycamore | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code