El Niño’s systemic drivers: Corporate agribusiness vulnerability exposed amid Pacific warming and climate injustice
Original framing: “El Niño Emerges in Pacific, Raising Heat Risks and Crop Threats” — Bloomberg
Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—who produce 80% of the world’s food—face 90% of El Niño’s agricultural losses but receive <2% of climate adaptation funding. Indigenous women, such as the *Mapuche* in Chile, are leading seed-saving initiatives that outperform corporate hybrids during droughts. Their knowledge is systematically excluded from UN climate negotiations, where agribusiness lobbies dominate.
El Niño’s emergence is not a random act of nature but a symptom of a global food system designed for short-term extraction, where 75% of agricultural land is dedicated to just 12 crops and 5 animal species, and 70% of freshwater is diverted to industrial agriculture.
The crisis disproportionately harms smallholders in the Global South—who contribute least to emissions—while corporate agribusiness profits from climate volatility, as seen in Cargill’s 2023 record grain profits during the 2023 El Niño. Indigenous and peasant systems, which have sustained communities through millennia of climate variability, offer proven alternatives but are systematically excluded by policy frameworks that privilege Western science and corporate interests. The solution lies in dismantling the extractive paradigm: redirecting subsidies to agroecology, enforcing climate reparations, and rewriting trade rules to prioritise resilience over profit. This requires not just technical fixes but a cultural shift—one that centres reciprocity over extraction, as embodied in Andean *ayni* or African *ubuntu*—where humanity’s relationship with Earth is rebalanced before the next El Niño becomes an extinction-level event.