The Migration Policy Institute produces a podcast series called Changing Climate, Changing Migration, which details the impact of climate change on migration patterns and the market economy. The episode “How Climate-Linked Food Insecurity Shapes Migration” highlights anthropologist Megan Carney, director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Regional Food Studies. Although the interactions among climate change, food insecurity, and migration may seem minimal, this episode provides a fascinating look into how they are constantly influencing one another. 

Food insecurity, defined as the lack of access to sufficient food for members of a household to lead healthy lives, can result from natural disasters, armed conflict, and land grabs. These events may be a result of scarce resources or other causes that can be exacerbated by climate change, forcing affected people to migrate. Most directly, climate change causes extreme and variable weather that can negatively impact food crops. As agricultural yields fall, poverty levels increase in rural environments, disproportionately impacting nations in the global South. We now see this disproportionate impact within Central America. Though the people of Central America are responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions, they are some of the most vulnerable to climate change. 

When food becomes scarce, communities lacking the political and economic resources necessary to adapt to the impacts of climate change often have no option but to migrate. For instance, almost one-third of the population in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is struggling through crisis levels of food insecurity. Specifically, in the past few years Guatemala has experienced droughts and floods that have caused crop failures, forcing hundreds of thousands of farmers to flee to Mexico and the United States. Even in Alta Verapaz, a mountainous state that once produced large crop yields, extreme weather has caused poverty and starvation. The chronically hungry inhabitants of the area have now begun to leave as well.

In search of both resources and work, many migrants move to urban communities inside and outside of their home countries. Unfortunately, the hardships associated with the squalid conditions of urban life stand in stark contrast to traditional rural life. These new urban dwellers often struggle to find decent-paying jobs that fit their skill set. Many cannot afford even basic necessities. High unemployment rates and limited resources can stoke tensions within communities and lead to conflict, economic exploitation, crime and violence, and widespread political discontent. 

Despite the devastating influence of climate change on food security and global migration patterns, many states  have yet to address these related concerns. Governments often conflate climate change and migration with security threats, permitting the allocation of funds toward military advancement rather than more equitable and just development models, which results in further harm to vulnerable communities. Funding the military in fact exacerbates the problem. The military often acts as an instrument of repression by exploitative landed elites and transnational corporations against the masses, mistreats migrants, and contributes to growing displacement of people.

The growing global immigration “crisis”  is evidence that the global North is failing to support just and sustainable development paths  in the global South.  Instead, international exploitative economic arrangements are facilitating the appropriation of natural resource wealth from the global South by the wealthier countries. The persistence of limited resources in the global South is the result of neoliberal economic policies implemented via well-known institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, along the lines of free trade agreements, market deregulation, and service privatization that benefit Western nations. These large political-economic powers have the capacity to provide aid but minimal incentive to do so. Their choice of neoliberal policies is not new, and in fact has roots in colonial and imperial histories that forced developing countries to remain dependent on Western societies. The US and other wealthy nations still perpetuate this dependence by relying on exploitative practices such as land grabbing (foreign powers’ acquisition of local land) to drive growing food and energy needs, displacing local farmers in the process. To avoid further suffering as a result of such exploitative practices, vulnerable communities attempt to flee to the US in search of help, demonstrating the ruinous reliance that the global South has on the North. 

As climate change continues to alter food production globally, the nations with the greatest wealth and power will have to take steps to mitigate increased migration rates. Currently, 86 percent of the world’s displaced people are hosted by low and middle income countries, whereas only 14 percent are hosted within high income countries. The burden of responsibility has disproportionately fallen on the nations that Western powers have victimized for centuries. It is time for Western nations to assume greater responsibility for mitigating climate change and human migration fueled by poverty, repression, and environmental injustice. Carney draws awareness to how migration trends are changing by highlighting the connection between climate-related food insecurity and migration and goes on to provide insight into just how feasible it may be for migration responsibility to be re-allocated. Be on the lookout for a new report this summer by the Global Center for Climate Justice that makes explicit the connections between neoliberalism, corporate power, and the global refugee crisis.