Racial capitalism causes food insecurity

Food insecurity is an important determinant of public health. Undernutrition, particularly of children, is a primary cause of ill health and premature mortality in the Global South.9 Famines represent an extreme case of food insecurity. Groundbreaking work by philosopher and economist Amartya Sen highlighted a surprising fact about this extreme case that is politically informative about the structure of our society: famines often are unrelated to food availability. This point is counterintuitive. Before Sen wrote, the traditional approach to explaining famines appealed to food scarcity: famine involves starvation, and starvation is lack of food. This “food availability approach” was assumed in classic works of economics and philosophy (most famously by Thomas Malthus). If you wanted to explain a famine, you appealed to activity in or of the natural world that would interact with the food supply: pests, droughts, heat waves.10 In “Famines,” Sen appeals to two cases. The first is a famine in Ireland following a potato crop failure in 1822. There, people starved to death even though there was plenty of corn to eat. The second concerns the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people starved to death even though food production had actually increased relative to 1941, when there was no famine at all. The food availability approach does not offer a satisfying explanation to these famines. In both cases, Sen argues, the failures were sociopolitical: the reluctance of the British Empire to defend its colonized subjects rather than particular elites’ financial interests.11 The reason that people starved in Bengal and Ireland is explicable in terms of the framework offered by racial capitalism, especially as explained by Robinson and Gilmore. Robinson notes that the social structure enabled by splitting the ruled into separate populations arranged into a sharp, vertically organized hierarchy was developed in Europe (to the disadvantage of groups like the Irish and the Slavs) and came to operate on a world scale (incorporating Africans and Indigenous peoples) because of European colonization and subsequent capitalism.12 These distinctions in hierarchy, Gilmore’s definition tells us, become differences in grouplevel vulnerability, with groups further down the racial hierarchy systematically experiencing more vulnerability than groups farther up. This stratification is exploitable by the political powers that be: in Ireland, to defend profits and colonial control by largely English elites (higher up the racial hierarchy than the Irish) and, in Bengal, to defend the strategic interests of the British military (which feared Japanese invasion in rural Bengal). The theory of ecologically unequal exchange allows us to tell this same kind of story on a global scale, and with a wider reference to ecological phenomena than with the narrow focus on agricultural systems. This theory holds that our world economic system moves energy and biophysical resources from poorer to richer countries. This scheme in turn distributes ecological risks perversely, tending to concentrate them in the Global South.13 With the Global South carved into planetary politics by the same forces that colonized Bengal and Ireland, richer countries like those in Europe are “draining ecological capacity from extractive regions by importing resource-intensive products and shifting environmental burdens to the South through the export of waste.”14 Similarly, environmental economists and geographers have advanced the “pollution haven hypothesis,” which predicts that companies faced with stringent and costly environmental regulations in one country or region will move production to places with less-stringent regulation. The relationship is causal: higher-income countries (disproportionately yesterday’s colonizers) have more economic leverage against companies and more politically empowered populations, which correlates with tougher environmental regulations. Some empirical work has lent support to this hypothesis.15 The locating of manufacturing in countries with weaker environmental regulations redistributes environmental risk along the same lines as the ecologically unequal exchange theory predicts and can be viewed as one causal mechanism within that theory’s larger story.16 Inequitable distribution of environmental risk doesn’t happen only at the global scale. Within countries, there are “green crime havens”—areas of unlawfully elevated environmental risk. As with the pollution haven hypothesis, this concept represents the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental vulnerability in ways that track power relations.17 And, as with the other theories, the relationship described is a causal one: researchers at Auburn University and the University of Florida explain that the havens arise “as part of power differences and corresponding zoning decisions,” not simply as a result of the havens’ proximity to natural resources that companies want access to for production.18 Whether one relies on the globally scoping ecologically unequal exchange theory, the transnational pollution haven hypothesis, or the idea of subnational green crime havens, the balance of evidence suggests that the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental risk reflects social power dynamics. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the relationship between the political power of a population and its susceptibility to environmental vulnerability is a causal one, not simply a set of unhappy coincidences. This fits squarely into Gilmore’s definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Racial capitalism, then, links racial power and security disparities themselves to environmental exposures and health outcomes.