June’s CPI and PPI both cooled, and the cooling reaches all the way back to Stage 1 — consistent with a genuine, if possibly temporary, easing of the energy shock rather than a one-month statistical blip. But most of the movement inside the food basket this month — dairy’s reversal, the citrus and lettuce climate stories, the tomato tariff baseline, Brazil’s coffee cycle, and the beef–pork divergence — traces to category-specific supply and policy dynamics that would be happening with or without the conflict.
A potential record El Niño is now forecast with high model consensus; the spring predictability barrier has been crossed; and we are within the critical agricultural windows for the most exposed crop systems.
