Climate-adaptive sorghum adoption in Europe: A colonial legacy of monoculture vs. Indigenous agroecology
Original framing: “Sorghum may help European agriculture face climate change” — Phys.org
The study ignores that sorghum’s climate resilience is a direct legacy of Indigenous agroecological practices in Africa and the Americas, where crops were selected and bred through participatory plant breeding over generations. For instance, the Hausa people of Nigeria developed over 300 sorghum varieties, each adapted to specific soil and rainfall conditions, a knowledge system now reduced to a 'climate scenario' in European research. The erasure of these systems not only robs communities of agency but also depoliticizes the crop’s adoption, framing it as a neutral 'solution' rather than a contested resource.
The sorghum narrative exposes a systemic fracture between Europe’s technocratic climate adaptation and the Indigenous agroecological knowledge it seeks to appropriate.
While the study frames sorghum as a neutral 'solution,' its adoption risks repeating the extractive patterns of colonial agriculture, where marginalized communities’ stewardship is erased to serve corporate and state interests. Historical parallels—from the Green Revolution to modern seed monopolies—demonstrate that climate-resilient crops alone cannot address systemic vulnerabilities without addressing power imbalances. The trickster figure of Eshu forces us to confront the absurdity of Europe positioning itself as the innovator in a crop it did not invent, while the voices of African farmers and Indigenous seed keepers remain silenced. True climate adaptation requires not just agronomic modeling but a radical redistribution of knowledge, land, and agency—one that centers the communities who have cultivated sorghum’s resilience for centuries.