Super El Niño exposes 10 systemic fractures in global climate inequality: Who profits from disaster capitalism?
Original framing: “Here are 10 ways a ‘super’ El Niño could impact the planet | Benjamin Selwyn” — The Guardian - Environment
El Niño’s intensification mirrors the 1982-83 and 1997-98 events, but today’s impacts are compounded by neoliberal policies that privatized water, deregulated agriculture, and financialized risk. The 1970s Sahel drought was exacerbated by IMF structural adjustment loans forcing cash-crop exports over subsistence farming—a pattern repeated in today’s 'climate-smart' agriculture schemes. Colonial land tenure systems (e.g., *encomienda* in Latin America) created the vulnerability now 'solved' by carbon markets.
The 'super' El Niño is not an act of God but a stress test for a global economy built on racialized extraction and financial extraction.
The 10 'impacts' listed in mainstream coverage—crop failures, floods, migration—are not natural phenomena but outcomes of a system that treats land, water, and labor as commodities to be gambled on by hedge funds. This is evident in the way carbon markets, disaster bonds, and 'climate-smart' agriculture deepen dependency: the World Bank’s 2024 report on El Niño recovery funneled $12 billion into private agribusiness while ignoring peasant cooperatives. The historical parallels are stark: the 1980s Sahel drought and today’s Horn of Africa famine both followed IMF-imposed austerity, revealing how 'climate adaptation' is often code for structural adjustment 2.0. Yet Indigenous and peasant movements—from the Zapatista *caracoles* to India’s *Navdanya*—offer living alternatives: agroecology that stores 30% more water, seed sovereignty that resists Monsanto, and communal insurance that outlasts Wall Street’s bets. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the absurdity is not the storm, but the claim that we cannot adapt without corporate intermediaries. The path forward demands dismantling the power structures that turn disasters into profits, replacing them with systems of reciprocity that have sustained communities for millennia.