Agricultural technology is embedded within the US security state – an exceptionalist ethos that creates racialized extraction and biopolitical management. Err neg -- the neoliberal eco-security framework has been normalized to be insulated against critique.

Eddens ’21 [Aaron Eddens, Assistant Professor of Global Studies & Social Impact at Grand Valley State University; “Securitizing the Climate Crisis: Racial Geographies of Empire and the Agri-Fintech Frontier”; American Studies, vol. 60, no. 3-4, 2021, pp. 63-68, doi.org/10.1353/ams.2021.0041; accessed via University of Michigan Libraries, 07-28-2024] dliang

In this article, I trace an emerging agri-fintech/U.S. security state nexus by reading narratives driving index insurance projects alongside two sets of U.S. government documents: 1) U.S. intelligence community assessments that describe climate change and food insecurity as threats to American national se- curity interests and 2) U.S. global food security policy and strategy documents. Using the concept of racial geographies, I draw out parallels between the ways that agri-fintech projects and the U.S. security state position Africa as a space of perennial crisis. These geographical representations extend long-standing Western depictions of Africa as a singular, separate, and inferior space. They form the bases for a resilience logic that calls for outside interventions—on the part of American special forces or multinational financial corporations—in the name of securing an ever-expanding frontier of climate risk.

This intersection of finance and empire occurs as the United States and China have ramped up development and security spending across Africa during the past decade, prompting some commentators to declare a new “scramble for Africa” (Carmody 2015; “The New Scramble for Africa” 2019). Yet, although scholarship on the contemporary Green Revolution for Africa has persuasively critiqued its “philanthrocapitalist” origins, neoliberal agenda, and intersections with corporate agribusiness and global finance, more work is needed to understand how its projects intersect with the American security state (Moseley, Schnurr, and Kerr 2015; Patel 2013; Schurman 2017). I use the term “security state” not just to refer to the parts of the state most commonly associated with “national security” or “defense,” but to signal more broadly the increasing orientation toward security thinking that has become pervasive across state institutions (Grewal 2017). Importantly, today’s Green Revolution builds upon a legacy of Cold War–era American agricultural development efforts across the Global South, which were deeply tied to U.S. foreign policy (Cullather 2013; Perkins 1997). Although the role of the United States has certainly taken a back seat to this generation’s Green Revolution funders—most notably the Gates Founda- tion, which is by far the largest financial backer of the Green Revolution across Africa—it remains important to connect the Revolution to American state power. Drawing out these connections, I suggest, demands greater attention to how to- day’s more privatized, more financialized Green Revolution builds upon legacies of racialized finance and empire. As Raj Patel (2013) argues, the Green Revolution in Africa is “more biopolitical—more focused on the management of individual bodies—than the original Green Revolution” (4). Agri-fintech’s focus on linking hundreds of millions of individual farmers to international commodity and financial markets certainly demonstrates this characteristic. But how are these efforts rooted in longer bio- and geopolitical histories? How might the financial inclusion frontier extend from a history in which finance capital has long sought out “subprime” populations as sites for extractive investment (Chakravartty and Ferreira da Silva 2012)? And how does a more “resilient” American security state build upon an American empire that has relied upon racial logics to justify both its exceptional status as a global police force in the war on terror and the need to secure the livelihoods of others (De Genova 2012)?

The ongoing, compounding crises of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have only heightened the stakes of this conversation. As a result of the global economic recession precipitated by the pandemic, a growing number of farmers and food workers worldwide have fallen into conditions of hunger and poverty with those across sub-Saharan Africa experiencing some of the most drastic increases in food insecurity. Against this backdrop, important international policy debates continue to question what building “resilience” into the food system should look like (Canfield, Anderson, and McMichael 2021; Clapp and Moseley 2020). On the one hand, scholars and activists argue that corporate-dominated, international trade-oriented “business as usual” across global food systems is exacerbating vulnerability, especially for the world’s poorest people (Belay and Bridget 2021; Wise 2020). Yet, at the same time, key institutional actors, such as the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are doubling down on their market-driven approach to managing food insecurity, largely through continued efforts to bring smallholder, subsistence farmers into international supply chains (Clapp and Moseley 2020). Agri-fintech companies such as ACRE and Pula that already market their technology as a form of crisis relief are well positioned to expand their operations through the pandemic (Reisman 2021). Yet questions remain about what kinds of social relations will be made resilient through the agri-fintech approach to managing the climate and COVID crises. Although agri-fintech’s financial inclusion paradigm promises to help the most vulnerable farmers manage their “climate risk,” this approach might normalize exploitative financial practices that reproduce much longer colonial and racialized lines of extraction in that value (here in the form of data and insurable risk) is extracted from African fields to generate capital that circulates to and from London, Brussels, New York, and Zurich.

Methodologically, I draw upon interviews with officials working for agri-fin- tech and development organizations that I conducted as part of a broader re- search project on the politics of the Green Revolution in Africa. I complement this interview-based research with close readings of the aforementioned U.S. government publications. I begin with a brief section that shows how climate change should be thought of as a deeply racialized phenomenon. Using “resilience” as a kind of nodal concept, I then trace connections across U.S. intelligence community assessments of food security and climate change and the U.S. Global Food Security Act/Strategy. I then situate contemporary index insurance projects within broader histories of racialized financial experimentation. Finally, I connect the “resilience thinking” found across index insurance projects, U.S. food security policy, and the security state’s climate change forecasts with the expansion of U.S. military operations across Africa during the Obama and Trump administrations.

The Climate Crisis’ Racial Geographies of Privilege and Vulnerability

In drawing out connections between racialized finance and the security state in an era of climate crisis, my approach builds upon scholarship that views both the causes and consequences of climate change as racialized. As Laura Pulido (2018) has recently written, despite much popular and scholarly attention generated by the term “Anthropocene”—the neologism that recognizes humans’ dramatic impact on the earth as a new geological epoch—there has been a dearth of attention to race and racism in mainstream conversations around climate change. Offering a much-needed corrective, Pulido insists that we recognize the role of race in the Anthropocene. “Certainly it is not solely a racial process,” Pulido writes, “but [racism] has played an important role in both producing it and in determining who lives and dies” (117). To illustrate her point, Pulido cites the inverse relationship between the countries that have contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions and those in which people are most likely to die from the effects of climate change (the United States and Western Europe have contributed the most fuel to the climate change fire, but Americans and Europeans are the least likely to die in the flames; the opposite is true for many countries in the Global South). This racialized “differential vulnerability,” she argues, is no accident of geography. Rather, it has been shaped through deep historical processes and different forms of racism, ranging from more overt ideologies of white supremacy to more insidious racisms that Pulido calls “evasion and indifference”—avoiding discussing histories of racism and being indifferent to harsh global, racial inequalities between north and south, white and nonwhite (118, 121-22). These different forms of racism increasingly work to shore up conceptual and material boundaries between the secured borders of the Global North and the places Naomi Klein (2016) describes as “sacrifice zones,” in which racialized bodies and the land they inhabit are rendered exploitable to the violent logic of extractive capitalism (n.p.).

Ashley Dawson (2017) provides a useful genealogy of Western security thinking that propagated this kind of “climate apartheid” (194). Dawson shows how, beginning in the 1990s, influential popular and academic writers in the West began to describe the figure of the environmental refugee in the Global South in terms of a security threat for the elite in the Global North (an argument perhaps most memorably captured by Robert Kaplan’s 1994 article in The Atlantic, “The Coming Anarchy,” which drew on racist and environmentally deterministic depictions of poverty in West Africa to warn readers of fast-approaching global threats). This line of thinking was soon adopted by official U.S. Department of Defense strategy and influential national security think tanks: Climate change became yet another justification for expanding the military industrial complex. As Dawson shows, this emerging climate security discourse isolated the source of the security threat in the Global South. It maintained racialized, colonial binaries that treated emerging “hotbeds” of climate-related unrest in the south as “isolated and self-contained entities, with no apparent relation to global systems of power and inequality, past and present” (210). This way of understanding the climate crisis continues to frame discussions of the growing number of climate migrants worldwide and the role of climate change in fueling social conflict and war. Crucially, this security approach to the climate crisis obscures more critical consideration of questions about how countries in the Global North might pay the “climate debt” they owe to people in the south. The material and discursive global divisions that Pulido (2018), Klein (2016), and Dawson (2017) trace can collectively be thought of in terms of racial geographies. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (2016) argues that the concept of racial geography is “not simply a term for describing a given effect in space in racial terms.” Rather, she writes, “racial geography is a technology of power, and when used as an analytic and theory of spatial production it indexes the series of techniques used to produce space in racial terms” (17, emphasis added). As Saldaña-Portillo shows through a discussion of the ways in which the national geographies of the United States and Mexico have been shaped through racialized conceptions of Indians and the land they inhabit, racial geography points to the historical relations that have shaped widely held geographical ideas. Applied to the global geographical divisions that shape the drastic inequalities of vulnerability to the ravages of the climate crisis, the concept helps us to think through the historical traces that shape “shared perceptions of space, governed by learned conventions that have developed over more than five hundred years” of colonialism and racial capitalism (19, emphasis in original). It helps us, in other words, think about how geographical constructions of frontier and sacrifice zones are produced and normalized. Applied to the agri-fintech/security state nexus, the concept allows us to question how spatial depictions of “risk environments” or zones for financial experimentation operate through longer legacies of racial geographies of privilege and vulnerability. To begin this line of inquiry, the next section shows how the U.S. security state forecasts the compounding crises of food insecurity and climate change in terms of a national security threat.

Building Resilience in a World of Vulnerability

U.S. national security assessments increasingly identify the intersection of climate change and global food security as a crucial factor shaping the security landscape. During the Obama administration, publications from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for long- term strategic analysis, began to describe climate change and food security as key national security issues. The NIC first examined the security implications of the global food system at a 2012 conference in Arlington, Virginia, at which agriculture and national security experts described food insecurity as a “threat multiplier”—the same term American defense officials have used to describe climate change.1 Volatilities across the global food system, the NIC warned, might force countries to pull out of international food markets “where the United States has a major economic interest” (NIC 2012, 13). At the behest of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and USAID director Raj Shah, the NIC continued to examine potential links between food security, climate change, and national security. The unclassified version of its 2015 global food security assessment declares that food insecurity in “many countries of strategic importance to the United States” is likely to increase and that the outlook for countries already experiencing food insecurity is likely to worsen.2 The NIC (2015) argues that intensifying climate change effects such as drought, conflict, and diseases could compound each other in the coming decade: “Warmer temperatures might lead to disease spread or prolonged drought, prompting rapid rural migration to cities. In turn, urban slums may become hotbeds for unrest” (1). In its 2016 assessment of climate change, the NIC (2016) further warns of the impending effects climate change would have on food security, suggesting that climate destabilization would soon lead to widespread social and political unrest. The report concluded that climate change was “likely to pose significant national security challenges for the United States over the next two decades” (5).

The NIC’s perspective on the looming threats of climate change and food insecurity is further detailed in its flagship quadrennial Global Trends publication. Titled The Paradox of Progress, the 2017 report outlines possible future scenarios in a world of ever more frequent shocks—things such as the Arab spring, the financial crisis of 2008-2009, and also large-scale droughts and flooding events (NIC 2017). Shortly after its release, the director of the NIC’s Strategic Futures Group, Suzanne Fry (2017), presented the report’s scenarios to a group of government officials and industry representatives at the Global Food Security Symposium in Washington, D.C. Appearing on a “food security is national security” panel, Fry told the audience that it wasn’t just countries such as Afghanistan and Somalia that should expect to see climate-triggered instability:

When we do our [global] risk analysis... I’m not kidding you— there’s something like two thirds of the planet that have risk conditions, literally about 120 countries... that have risk conditions that make them vulnerable to a shock that could tee off large-scale instability. You compound that with some pretty profound demographic shifts, technological shifts, and we have been living through climate shifts—and [then] the next phase of these climate shifts. So we’ve got a great deal of vulnerability in the world.

Fry stressed that the United States would not be able to isolate itself from this increasing vulnerability. Discussing American trade interests in particular, she urged that the United States would need to anticipate how climate events could set off shocks that could ripple through the global food system. The best way to manage these inevitable shocks, Fry argued, was to “invest in resilience in... both the economic systems but also the natural systems that allow for food security across the whole planet.”

Fry (2017) equates resiliency with strengthening international trade and describes resilience as something that can be cultivated in both “economic” and “natural systems.” In making this link, Fry’s use of resilience illustrates a kind of thinking that Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper (2011) trace to the concept’s origins at the intersection of ecology and neoliberal economic theory. Showing how the concept originates in the ecological theory of complex adaptive systems, Walker and Cooper argue that its sweeping uptake as a governing logic across multiple sectors has much to do with how it aligns with the influential neoliberal economist and philosopher Fredrich Hayek’s ideas that economic markets function as “complex ecological systems.” Examining parallels between two key thinkers, one from ecology (Holling), and the other from neoliberal economics (Hayek), they show how these two strands of thought “have ended up merging in the contemporary discourse of crisis response through resilience” (Walker and Cooper 2011, 144). Importantly, Walker and Cooper argue that the concept itself works to normalize the neoliberal management of an increasing array of social life. Pointing to the “resiliency” that the concept itself has, they suggest that the political stakes surrounding the governmental uses of resilience are indeed high: “At stake in this tacit union [of ecological and economic thinking] is a governmental philosophy of nature and society so all-encompassing and resilient to critique that the effects of political interventions (and non-interventions) made in its name, even when catastrophic, seem as inescapable as the weather” (144-45). As I explore further below, we should ask how resilience normalizes particular approaches to risk management in the realm of food security.