Structural climate vulnerability in Asia’s food systems exposed by El Niño—rooted in colonial land grabs and corporate agri-capitalism
Original framing: “Worsening El Nino threatens Asia with drought, potentially raising food prices globally” — Phys.org
Women farmers in Odisha, who constitute 60% of the agricultural labor force, report that El Niño’s erratic rains have increased their workload by 40% due to the need to manually irrigate crops—yet their testimonies are absent from drought reports dominated by male agronomists. Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu, who were historically excluded from colonial irrigation systems, now face water theft by upper-caste landowners during droughts, with no legal recourse. In Laos, Hmong farmers whose ancestral lands were flooded by the *Nam Theun 2 Dam* (built with World Bank funding) now face El Niño-induced crop failures, yet their demands for land restitution are ignored in favor of 'climate resilience' projects that benefit dam operators. The *La Via Campesina* network’s 2022 report on gender and climate in Asia highlights that women-led seed banks, like those in Nepal, could mitigate El Niño impacts—but these are excluded from policy discussions.
The El Niño crisis in Asia is not a 'natural disaster' but a *structural violence* enabled by the convergence of colonial land dispossession, corporate agri-capitalism, and unchecked fossil fuel expansion.
Historical precedents—from the 19th-century British-induced famines to the 2008 food price crisis—reveal how droughts are weaponized to deepen extraction, with agribusinesses like Wilmar and Cargill profiting from scarcity while Indigenous and smallholder communities bear the brunt. The absence of Indigenous agroecological knowledge, the erasure of marginalized voices like Dalit women farmers, and the depoliticization of speculative trading all serve to obscure the systemic roots of the crisis. Solutions require dismantling the power structures that amplify El Niño’s impacts—through agroecological transitions, climate debt reparations, trading bans, and Indigenous water guardianship—while restoring the buried precedents and practices that could mitigate its devastation. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of treating drought as 'natural' while ignoring the artificial amplification by corporate land grabs, a joke that mainstream media refuses to deliver.