It wasn’t until she found herself lining up for a 300-metre head-to-head race on horseback that Associate Professor Caroline Schuster truly understood the meaning of financial speculation in rural Paraguay.

By the time she was ready to gallop bareback atop Cohete – the fierce horse that would carry her to victory – she had spent a year in the country studying sesame farming and the dubious business of climate-based insurances.

“No amount of reasoned debate about efficiency and velocity would have afforded me a set of stirrups or a helmet; after all, the fun was in the riskiness of the venture – at least for the spectators!” she recounts.

Soon after her triumphant finish, the earnings from the low-stakes bets quickly transformed into cases of cold beer from the village kiosk, as everyone gathered to recount the highlights of the day.

That’s when Schuster realised the farmers’ gambling appetite was not a question of money.

“It was about shared community values and the thrill of a collective spectacle amidst endless bad news of crop failure and family hardship,” she explains.

Her adventures are now immortalised in a comic book that captures the findings of her field trip: a vivid snapshot of agrarian life in times of climate disasters.

But long before becoming a cartoon, Schuster had to brave much more than a reckless horse race – trigger warning: it involved mythical monsters, severe weather hazards and spooky financial systems.

Weathering disaster

Intrigued by the dynamics of commercial farming in Paraguay, Schuster spent over a year in the north of the country, conducting anthropology fieldwork on agricultural finances.

Like the lessons from the horse race, becoming close to the community revealed new perspectives of the riskiness of rural life. But this time, it was not low-stakes, community fun – it was high-stakes community crises where farmers could lose everything in a game stacked against them.

“With the planet heating up at unprecedented levels, there are increasingly unknowable environments that rural communities must contend with,” she explains.

She met Don Wilfrido, a then 79-year-old sesame farmer whose life story now unfolds as the central narrative in her graphic novel, Forecasts: A story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster.

Like many others in his guild, Wilfrido and his family struggle to make ends meet. But overlooked issues are buried within the challenges of farming. Schuster unearths these in her book.

“With the planet heating up at unprecedented levels, there are increasingly unknowable environments that rural communities must contend with,” she explains.

“The knowledge passed down from one generation to the next is no longer enough to face weather disasters. Farmers’ lives have become entangled with outsiders, ranging from crop scientists to financing companies.”

As agrarian communities grapple with weather-induced harvest failures, micro-insurance companies have emerged as the go-to solution for under-resourced farmers.

But, paradoxically, these entities base their policies on weather conditions rather than providing indemnity for actual damages.

Using satellite technology to monitor rainfall and temperature, insurance payouts trigger when severe weather alerts are issued – not when farmers suffer actual losses on the ground.

“Making climate-related losses an individual responsibility misses the wider inequity – how is it that the challenge of managing climate risks has been allocated to communities who have contributed so little to global heating, and yet pay the ultimate price?” Schuster asks.

“The true complexity comes when you realise local insurance and finance companies are convinced they are doing the right thing, approaching climate adaptation with the very best intentions.”

Cartooning research

Forecasts came about as a genuine collaboration with two Paraguayan illustrators who skilfully transformed the overlapping worlds of Schuster’s research into mesmerising comic vignettes.

“I was more concerned about representing the complexity of my research than translating my work to non-expert audiences. But in the end, the comic turned out to be an effective means to accomplish both,” Schuster says.

In a style reminiscent of Latin American magical realism, Guarani mythological creatures also join her fictional world, underscoring the significant role Indigenous cultural heritage continues to play in rural communities. 

“We don’t usually think of Latin America as a settler society, but telling Paraguayan history through the lens of financial speculation reveals the tight links between Indigenous dispossession, foreign speculation on land and environmental risks,” she says.

“On top of these challenges, local farmers choose to believe in myths involving tricksters and supernatural beings present in their popular culture.

 “I wanted to include this duality in my book. After all, are insurance agents any more reliable or malevolent than pomberos (nocturnal monsters) or practitioners of macumba (witchcraft)?” she muses.

Taking a sci-fi turn, the story offers multiple endings, unravelling an intricate web of speculative multiverses. 

“Everyday life for Paraguayan sesame farmers is concerned with asking ‘what if’. We wanted to bring the idea of speculation beyond economics, taking seriously the visions that local communities have about their futures,” Schuster explains.

“These might be hopeful, or they might be warnings of trouble ahead. Either way, we shouldn’t grant finance a monopoly on ‘technologies of imagination’!”

All in all, Schuster is hoping her book can help farmers and climate-impacted communities reclaim the protagonist role in their own stories.

“We need new ways of envisioning life in uncertain, unknowable environments, and comic books give us the perfect opportunity to do so.”

This article was originally published on ANU Reporter, titled "Kapow! ANU researcher uses comic books to explain green finance".

A digital copy of Forecasts: A Story of Weather and Finance at the Edge of Disaster is available at ANU library here.

An open access copy of Fences, Schuster latest release, is available here.