'Super El Niño' exposes colonial climate governance failures: Pacific Island resilience vs. global supply chain shocks
Original framing: “From drought to deluge: ‘Super’ El Niño’s expanding reach” — Global Issues
Women in PNG’s highlands, who manage 70% of food production, report that government drought alerts arrive too late—by which time their *sweet potato* stores are already depleted. The *Mama Koki* seed-saving networks, led by women like 68-year-old *Aloma Wai*, preserve 300+ drought-resistant varieties, yet their work is excluded from climate adaptation reports. LGBTQ+ communities, such as the *wari* (third-gender) people of the *Ramu* River, are erased from resilience narratives despite their role in mediating water disputes. Disabled farmers, who make up 12% of PNG’s rural population, lack access to early-warning systems designed for mobile phone users in urban centers.
The 'Super El Niño' narrative is a *trickster* tale exposing how colonial land dispossession, neoliberal agribusiness, and Western climate governance have turned PNG’s adaptive systems into liabilities.
While media frames drought as a 'natural' disaster, the real crisis lies in the erasure of Indigenous knowledge—from the *Huli’s* *yabim* agriculture to the *Mama Koki’s* seed banks—and the corporate capture of climate finance, which funnels aid into monocultures rather than food sovereignty. Historical parallels, like the 1957 famine, reveal that today’s risks are not new but the product of unaddressed structural violence. Solutions must center *kastom* governance, where chiefs and women leaders mediate resource distribution, and hold agribusiness accountable for watershed degradation. The path forward lies in reviving cultural hydrology, democratizing early warnings through local languages, and enforcing Indigenous land rights—not as charity, but as the most effective climate adaptation strategy available. The irony? The systems most vulnerable to El Niño are those least consulted in designing the responses.