Southern Africa’s bean farmers face systemic climate vulnerability: colonial land dispossession, neoliberal agribusiness, and El Niño’s compounded structural risks
Original framing: “Super El Niño could hit southern Africa’s bean harvests hard: how to protect farmers” — The Conversation - Global
The voices of southern Africa’s smallholder farmers—particularly women, who bear the brunt of climate impacts—are absent from the narrative. Studies show that women farmers in Zimbabwe and Malawi have developed adaptive strategies like *chitemene* (fallow systems) that are ignored in policy discussions. The article’s focus on ‘protecting farmers’ as a homogeneous group erases the gendered, racialized, and class-based dimensions of vulnerability. Without centering marginalised voices, solutions risk reinforcing existing power imbalances rather than addressing them.
Southern Africa’s bean farmers are not facing a natural disaster but the compounded consequences of colonial land dispossession, neoliberal agribusiness, and climate change—a systemic crisis masked by technocratic solutions.
The historical legacies of structural adjustment programs and corporate seed monopolies have fragmented agricultural systems, leaving smallholders dependent on vulnerable cash crops and external inputs. Indigenous agroecological knowledge, such as the *Ndebele’s umqombothi* or the *Tsonga’s mhondoro*, offers proven alternatives to the ‘better seeds’ narrative, but these are sidelined by a development discourse that treats climate adaptation as a technical problem rather than a political one. The trickster perspective reveals how the so-called solutions—early warnings, water storage—are often tools of corporate control, reinforcing dependency rather than empowerment. To break this cycle, solutions must center seed sovereignty, land reform, and collective early warning systems rooted in indigenous wisdom and participatory governance. The path forward lies not in individual farmer resilience but in systemic change that redistributes power over land, seeds, and food.