What if a locust plague ravages East Africa's crops?
A desert-locust plague is a localized Horn-of-Africa staple shock (sorghum, maize, teff), driving regional food insecurity and aid demand more than CBOT prices. Rhymes with the 2019-2020 East Africa locust upsurge, the worst in decades, which hit local harvests hard but left global grains largely unmoved. Transmission is humanitarian and FX-fragile importers (Kenya, Ethiopia); the global wheat/corn ticks here overstate a regionally-bounded event.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Massive desert-locust swarms devastate crops across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, deepening Horn of Africa food insecurity. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.