How Climate-Linked Food Insecurity Shapes Migration

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CHAPTERS 

[00:02:43]: How economic change reshapes rural and agrarian livelihoods 

[00:04:21]: Women’s migration experiences in contexts of food insecurity 

[00:09:28]: Food insecurity beyond hunger: social and economic impacts 

[00:13:28]: How food insecurity influences migration decisions 

[00:15:28]: Migration as a long-standing response to scarcity 

[00:17:50]: Remittances and resilience: can migration offset food insecurity? 

[00:22:10]: How the global food system shapes vulnerability 

[00:27:50]: Policy responses: addressing food insecurity across borders 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:04.08] 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration, the podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that looks at how climate change is affecting human movement. My name is Julian Hattem and I'm your host of this podcast and the editor of the Migration Information Source, which is MPI's in house online magazine. This podcast is part of our special focus on climate change and migration, which goes along with a series of articles available online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. The relationship between climate change and migration is complex, but one of the things that seems clear is that there is not a direct line between particular changes in the climate and an individual's decision to migrate. When climate or environmental change impacts people's movement, it often happens through other intervening variables as part of a broader universe of factors. A lot of these mechanisms are pretty complicated, but one that makes a lot of sense is food. Especially for communities that depend on farming and livestock. Environmental change can create problems for their livelihood, which affects their food security. Or to put it more simply, people who might have been dependent on growing food for themselves or to sell because of climate change now become less sure where their next meal is coming from.

[00:01:25.14] 

That might be a good reason to move someplace else. So to talk about this today, I am joined by Megan Carney. Megan is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona and of its center for Regional Food Studies. She has written a lot about the intersection of migration, food, and climate change, and I am very excited to welcome her on Megan, thank you so much for joining me.

[00:01:47.10] 

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

[00:01:50.13] 

So let's start with food. When scholars talk about migration, they tend to use a few different overarching categories, such as labor migration, which is people moving from one place to another for work, or humanitarian migration, which is refugees, asylum seekers. But we don't really tend to talk a lot about food as a component of migration. What role does food and food insecurity play in people's decisions to migrate? And why might we want to pay closer attention to that?

[00:02:20.08] 

That's such a good question. And food is so prominent in understanding contemporary migration patterns in the world. So I would first, I guess, draw our attention to what's been happening, both environmentally and economically, around the world over the past few decades? For starters, I think about migration both structurally and relationally. So when you alluded to this broader universe of variables, that's exactly what I'm speaking to. So in the past few decades, we have witnessed the unraveling effects of neoliberal economic policies, primarily in the Global South. And these policies, including such things as free trade agreements, deregulation of markets, privatization of services. This is a very familiar kind of narrative for those of us in the social sciences thinking about the ways that welfare states have been dismantled primarily because of corporate agendas and private interests dictating the parameters of our global economy and within that, food systems. So thinking about the effects of neoliberal economic policies, structural adjustment programs, these have targeted or have had the most acute effects for people who depend on the land for their livelihood. So agrarian based livelihoods, and many, we're talking millions of people in the past few decades alone have migrated from rural to urban areas, have migrated from the global south to the global north because of dispossession, both, well, debt dispossession and displacement from those livelihoods.

[00:04:13.17] 

And you know, it's often talked about as economic migration, but I actually contest that framing. People don't think of their lives in terms of wages. We cannot reduce humans to being wage earners. They think about their lives. We all think about our lives in much more complex terms. So we think about the social obligations, we have, the obligations to kin food, so these immediate sort of material needs and also our affective or relational kinds of obligations. So I actually think that the repeated sort of invocation of so called economic migrants is in many ways a form of violence in itself because it dismisses all the other variables that require migration as a necessary strategy of survival. So that's on the one hand, sort of the economic dynamics that have been unfolding and affecting people's lives in what, for the most part in the global south, but environmentally, we have also been observing over the last few decades these global climactic changes that are also rendering people's livelihoods, land based livelihoods, untenable. And so when we talk about environmental displacement, we're often talking about food related displacement, people no longer able to feed themselves. And so, you know, looking at the latest figures, for instance, from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United nations, almost a billion people worldwide are experiencing chronic hunger and food insecurity.

[00:06:06.10] 

That's probably a conservative estimate. Here in the US we have close to 50 million households experiencing or reporting chronic food insecurity. Again, those numbers are probably quite conservative, especially in light of the pandemic and the effects of the pandemic on national food insecurity. So I'll pause there, but this is why for me it's so important that we do foreground food and talking about food insecurity and how that is shaping patterns of migration. Around the world, and also why we also need to bring much more attention to integrating policies that have to do with economic development, migration, food systems, because at present those as realms of policy making are very much compartmentalized and not at all integrated.

[00:07:04.10] 

So let's bring climate and environmental change into this then. Right. You talked about agrarian communities as one of the people who is affected by food insecurity and other problems in recent years. I guess is. Are agrarian communities as it relates to climate change, some of the people we're mostly talking about here? Or I guess how does climate change work on specific. How do the impacts of climate change work on helping individuals and which communities to decide whether or not to migrate? What kind of decision making process, I guess, goes on in that situation to the extent that you can describe it and what does that look like?

[00:07:44.01] 

Sure. Well, we could talk broadly about patterns observed of drought and desert desertification, as well as catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes and storm surges and floods that are disrupting food systems. In regions of the world where I work or look at migration from, so Mexico and Central America as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. These are regions that are feeling these acute environmental disturbances that have an impact on land based livelihoods. But as an anthropologist, I collect people's stories and put those stories into circulation to bring attention to people's suffering and the effects of structural inequalities in people's everyday lives. So in my own work, specifically in my work with women who have migrated from Central America and rural parts of the Mexico to the United States in the last couple of decades, when we spoke about their experiences of migration and their decisions to migrate, they almost invariably invoked this refrain of back there, there was nothing to eat. And that was kind of the refrain with which they began these very elaborate narratives of migration. But it always began with the relationship they had, very intimate relationship they had with feeding and eating.

[00:09:20.22] 

And so when that relationship was disrupted and chronically right over the span of many weeks or many months, that was ultimately what prompted them to frame things as they had no other option but to migrate. It was a survival strategy to support themselves and their families. So I think especially important for understanding women's migration because if we look at sort of the gender division around feeding and care work, women disproportionately around the world are charged with this labor or burdened disproportionately by this labor. So it does tell us something about sort of the gendered dynamics of migration, differences between men and women's migration, and sort of the decision making that goes on. But in terms of looking at those women's narratives and what were they alluding to back there? There was nothing to eat. They went into more detail about drought after drought, right after seasons of season after season of harvest, a failed harvest because of drought or other environmental disturbances. And so these, these land based livelihoods that were increasingly threatened by environmental conditions, changing environmental conditions, but also because of what was happening within local markets. So trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, it is well known that that agreement had massive economic impacts on local markets in rural Mexico and made it very difficult for small farmers to compete with imports from the US primarily corn, but other, but other subsidized foods as well.

[00:11:28.20] 

That's, that's great. I really, I hate to say love, but that phrase back there, there was nothing to eat. I think it's incredibly evocative and very, very telling. And that's, that's and tragic in a lot of ways too. And so I guess to what extent is that like a literal phrase? Or in other words, I mean, to what extent do. Is the lack of livelihood, lack of being able to provide, to care for the family or, you know, for oneself and one kin and broader network, like literally about food or to what extent is that kind of a metaphor or a symbolic representation of broader caring responsibilities? Does that make sense? Is food actually the literal thing or is it a stand in for these broader caring systems?

[00:12:14.18] 

It's both and yeah, both literally in terms of like thinking about food insecurity and what, how we define food insecurity or measure it. We're not just talking about calories in versus calories out. We're also talking about food that's been obtained through what are considered culturally appropriate means. And the food itself is deemed socially acceptable in terms of culinary preferences, taste preferences, but yes, also symbolically the relationships that are cemented through the exchange, preparation, sharing of food and food as a site of care, among many other caring forms of care. So yeah, I elaborate on kind of the metaphor and literal meanings of this, of this phrase in, in my book The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders.

[00:13:22.07] 

And so you talk about. I wanted to talk a little bit more about how we define food insecurity, as you mentioned, because it's not really, as I understand it, a binary concept. You either are food secure or food insecure.

[00:13:32.05] 

Right.

[00:13:32.11] 

There's more of a scale of insecurity. So I guess is there a tipping point at which migration becomes an increasingly, increasingly attractive option? Or I guess what are the conditions under which high degrees of food insecurity are a strong enough push that make attract like migration become increasingly attractive or which compel migration from what you have seen?

[00:13:55.19] 

So I mean, that's a great question. And I. So yes, food insecurity is multidimensional. We cannot sort of reduce it to any one variable. It has political, economic, social dimensions and environmental dimensions, of course. And there are many definitions and approaches to measuring food insecurity that are. The U.S. department of Agriculture has its own classification system and tools for measurement. The FAO has its own. So as an anthropologist, I mean, I think about sort of food insecurity from a historical perspective. So you know, how has the human relationship to food and diet changed throughout millennia? And so actually it gets really interesting then putting that kind of thinking into conversation with migration from a historical perspective and how not just humans, but all animals have relied on migration as a survival strategy. So there is if, you know, if we go back to before there were even the earliest dates, I've been reading some James Scott recently and thinking about early state formation. But prior to that, humans being hunter foragers, migration was a survival strategy. If one habitat no longer was providing the resources that were necessary to one's survival, then you, you migrated and sought other environments where there were, there were more resources in abundance.

[00:15:46.13] 

It was not until the introduction of early states and domestication and reliance on primarily grain based diets that people that migration actually became perceived as a threat to the state, consolidating power and controlling a population within a demarcated territory. And so at that time, actually those who were not living within the context of these early state formations were considered threats to state power and labeled as barbarians and other things. So of course we're talking about many generations of sort of this changing, evolving relationship between humans and our food system.

[00:16:38.24] 

And related I guess to that of the decision making process is as you know, historically with the rise of like farming or whatever, migration serves many purposes. It is not simply this. There is no value in the land here. We have to go to another place and get value from the land there. I mean, migration can do a lot of things for people, right? People can migrate as a way to send back money to their origin community to make it more resilient, invest in newer technologies. They can, you know, migrate for seasonally migrate, like maybe go during lean times, if the summer, poor, rainy season, whatever, then you come back. But sometimes people migrate for good. They like start over from scratch. They say, the place I'm in is not working for me. Let's start over in place X in situations that you have seen, what of those strategies? How does migration work in these contexts? When food production and food inability to feed oneself and one family rises to such a level that migration becomes an attractive option, what does that migration do? I guess is my question.

[00:17:50.13] 

Well, so I, I have theorized migration as a strategy for subverting what I call the biopolitics of food insecurity. This notion that neoliberal capitalism has allowed for capital and commodities to move across borders without restriction, whereas labor and human bodies, right, are restricted in their movement across borders. And with that, so food as an import, as a commodity moves across borders, but because of really what we might think about as sort of the political economy of different settings around the world, people have uneven life chances and uneven access to that food to sustain themselves and lead a healthy, full life. So then migration is a means of subverting that regime. The biopolitics of food insecurity. And specifically for women who are migrating, many of them, those who I have worked with over the years in my ethnographic field work, have been able to sustain households across borders. So many women migrate without their children and leave children in the care of elders, of grandparents or siblings, and sometimes or oftentimes have additional children upon sort of recreating the conditions of life in another setting. So in the US, women will perhaps have children and then they are caring for children across borders, attending to the needs of children in different national settings.

[00:19:58.23] 

So it's, you know, how, in terms of how successful women feel in being able to attend to the needs of households across these, you know, disparate geographic settings is sort of, is somewhat ambiguous. And I say that because this is not only true for women I've worked with in the US it's true for migrants I've worked, worked with in southern Europe, in Italy and on the island of Sicily who feel this sense of disappointment or disillusionment with migrating, realizing that the conditions of their everyday existence haven't really improved all that much and that they are still struggling to make ends meet. And the aspirations that they may have had of sending remittances home or to their places of origin seems still somewhat out of reach.

[00:21:11.14] 

Which I guess leads me to, I guess what will be my last question. I like to think about policies and policy interventions and ways to make situations better, I guess, writ large. So, you know, we talked about a lot of these issues and some, some of the problems and concerns that individuals, communities are facing. What efforts and policies are underway or could be underway to mitigate some of the harms that are, that we've described either at NGOs or at international bodies, government level, to either make migration, make people feel like they do not necessarily have to migrate if they do not want to, or to give people control, I guess, over, over their choices and their food, and reduce food insecurity writ large. What sort of policies are underway, what sort of programs are underway and what should be underway that are not necessarily out there in the world?

[00:22:10.22] 

Okay, well, I mean, I think first of all, let's just talk about the food system for a moment, the global industrial food system, and not forget that the food system accounts for significant share of greenhouse gas emissions. The estimates range somewhere between 25 to up to 50% from industrial agriculture and everything associated with it, transportation, distribution systems, etc. So, you know, thinking about the food system, so disruptions to people's relationship with food rendering conditions of food insecurity and how that intersects with the climate impacts of a particular set of institutional arrangements, arrangements that make up today's global industrial food system. So we, we, we do need policies that are holding all of these truths together in one space rather than, as I said previously, as they are somewhat compartmentalized today. But we also need to hold those truths together with thinking about migration and the causes of human displacement across environments. So I think when policymakers talk about migration, they're often thinking about migration as this homogeneous process or homogenous across time and space. And this is why it's so important for me in the work that I do to constantly kind of hold this analytical frame of intersectionality.

[00:23:47.17] 

So the ways that experiences through, through policy formations have differential effects on people's lives, articulating with things like race, class, gender, citizenship, disability, age, all of these things, all of these variables matter. And so we have to nuance, have nuance in the kinds of policies that are put forward to attend to people's needs as they exist differentially across time and space. You know, going back to thinking about the impacts of the organization or arrangements that make up our global food system, we have to realize or acknowledge that this system is working exactly as it was designed. Sometimes you'll hear that our food systems are broken have taken many cues from critical race scholars who study the food system and point out that actually this food system is not broken. It's working as it was designed and it is reproducing these structures of power and privilege and inequality. And so if we, if we want meaningful change, we really have to rethink what is the ultimate goal of of kind of any sort of policy? Are we reproducing these relationships on a global scale that trace back to colonialism and are consistent with neoliberal capitalism and favoring the interests of corporations?

[00:25:46.15] 

Or are we actually foregrounding people and the democratic participation of people who, who do practice land based livelihoods and whose labor is so integral to food and food systems? So, you know, I think that's, I think that is really just important to keep in mind and in making any kinds of policy changes is just how much of the current system is not sustainable and needs to be dismantled before we can rebuild in a way that values human lives. And so in that sense, any kind of agenda for food justice on a global scale should be in conversation with any kind of policies that are attempting to address migration.

[00:26:50.12] 

This has been a super fascinating discussion and I really appreciated it. Thank you so much for coming on.

[00:26:55.11] 

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this opportunity.

[00:27:02.06] 

Megan Carney is an anthropologist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona, and she's the director of the Center for Regional Food Studies there. She's also the author of the book The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders, which touches on a lot of the issues that we discussed here today, as well as the forthcoming book called island of Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean, which will be out in May. She's also on Twitter. You can follow her there @megan_a_carney. Migration is a pretty complicated process, and when we talk about how climate change impacts migration, a lot of times we're talking about how the climate affects something else, like access to food, which in turn impacts or prompts migration. As Megan noted, there are a lot of intervening variables and a lot of factors that push and pull on one another. So in one sense, this makes the conversation much more difficult because it's harder to trace precisely how an individual storm or drought affects someone's decision to migrate. But looked at another way, it also opens the door to a much broader discussion because the climate is the backdrop for a lot of components of our lives.

[00:28:17.21] 

So when the climate changes, it impacts our livelihoods, our politics, our economic systems, and it even impacts how we eat or how sure we are that there is enough food to go around. If you enjoyed this conversation, please check out other episodes of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. The podcast is available online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts or you can subscribe to the podcast service of your choice. A companion series of articles is available on our website at migrationpolicy.org/climate. This episode was produced by Kenia Guerrero and made available by Lisa Dixon with oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt. The music you have heard is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. My name is Julian Hattem. I'll see you next time.