Milton Calle, owner of the exporter Boom Fruit, which grows in the Piura and Casma regions, expects the 2026/27 season to leave 80,000 to 100,000 tonnes for export, down about 60 per cent from the 223,686 tonnes shipped last year.

"I think we're going to see a drop of about 60 per cent in production, mainly due to El Niño," he told FreshPlaza. No producer body has issued a forecast, and every estimate circulating in the trade traces back to Calle, who works from an unofficial planted-area figure of about 55,000 hectares.

The last time coastal heat wrecked the crop, in 2023/24, the market moved sharply. US imports of guavas, mangoes and mangosteens from Peru — a customs category the country fills almost entirely with mango — fell 74 per cent, to 24,683 tonnes, according to US Census Bureau data accessed via Cropli; shipments into the EU fell 61 per cent, Eurostat figures show. Mexico took half the US market and Brazil two-thirds of Europe's.

On the Rungis wholesale market outside Paris, the price of sea-freighted Peruvian Kent mangoes rose 85 per cent, to a seasonal average of €3.58 a kilogram from €1.94, before falling back the following year.

At Piura, which Calle says accounts for 72 per cent of national volume, the June-July overnight low averaged 22.16°C this year at Cropli's monitoring points — the second-highest reading in 87 years of record, after the super-El Niño of 1997, and 4.02°C above the 1991-2020 average. That is hotter than in 2023, when the crop last failed.

Kent, the variety that makes up more than 90 per cent of Peru's mango exports, needs cool nights for floral induction, the process that sets a tree's flowers, and Peruvian agronomists put the optimum at 16 to 20°C. Nights in Piura this year have run at 22 to 23°C. SENAMHI, Peru's national weather service, recorded a daytime high of 34.2°C on 12 July, breaking a record set in July 1997, and the heat has stretched the trees' starch accumulation to about 160 days from a normal 100, leaving too few reserves to flower heavily.

Piura had flowered only 10 to 15 per cent by mid-August, Calle said. "The main northern zones have only completed 15 per cent of the flowering, a very low level for August, generating uncertainty around available volumes and supply continuity," said Dante Moreno, a commercial manager who links Peruvian growers with Dutch importers.

ENFEN, Peru's multi-agency El Niño committee, kept the country on coastal El Niño alert on 14 August and raised the odds of a "strong" event over December to March to 43 per cent, and of an "extraordinary" one to 41 per cent, from 38 and 33 per cent a month earlier. It forecast air temperatures well above normal along the entire coast through October, spanning flowering, fruit set and the start of the Piura harvest. The committee's next update is due on 28 August.

Peru's shortfall is arriving as Ecuador's crop also shrinks.

The National Mango Board, citing Fundación Mango Ecuador, projects Ecuador's 2026 shipments down 52.5 per cent, though Calle puts the drop closer to 75 per cent. That leaves Brazil, whose crop is rising, as Europe's main alternative.

"The El Niño effect means that both Ecuador and Peru are expected to produce significantly fewer mangoes ... dependence on Brazilian mangoes will increase in the coming months," said Sander Moret of the Dutch importer Hars & Hagebauer.

There are reasons to discount the size of the loss. Calle himself notes that a 15 per cent flowering rate does not translate into an 85 per cent fall in exports, because fruit usually sold locally or to the freezing industry is being redirected abroad, and that Peru can produce about 800,000 tonnes against a market that absorbs some 500,000.

However, growers were also weakened before the heat arrived. After prices collapsed below cost in the 2024/25 season, many in Piura lost bank financing and left plantations unmaintained — enough, APEM's then-president said, to stop 40 to 50 per cent of one major valley from flowering regardless of the weather.

US wholesale prices for Mexican Kent mangoes, meanwhile, are running at year-ago levels — and in some markets below — despite tighter supply.

Peru's first mangoes will not reach export markets until the first week of October, leaving the size of the crop, for now, a matter of flowering counts and forecasts.