Both companies explicitly brand their financial services in terms of the climate crisis, marketing their insurance products as tools that can, as Pula's website declares, "power the resilience and profitability of smallholder farmers" (Pula n.d.). 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 de- scribe climate change and food insecurity as threats to American national security interests and 2) U.S. global food security policy and strategy documents. [...]of the global economic recession precipitated by the pandemic, a growing num- ber 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. 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).
Securitizing the Climate Crisis: Racial Geographies of Empire and the Agri-Fintech Frontier