Private finance for food system climate adaptation: opportunity or contradiction?

Abstract

Financialized food systems and climate change adaptation intersect in important ways. Financial actors have increasingly invested in commodity futures and commodity index products to capitalize on more volatile food prices that result from climate-induced changes in both supply and demand for crops. Growing financial investment in farmland has brought new lands into cultivation in the face of yield declines and to produce biofuel feedstocks to cut fossil fuel emissions. Meanwhile, financial derivative products such as weather-based insurance are marketed to farmers to insulate them from the effects of climate change. Proponents maintain that financial responses along these lines can smooth adjustments to a changing climate. But, as we argue, these measures can also reinforce industrial models of agricultural production and exacerbate social inequities, which can deepen the dynamics that contribute to climate change and exacerbate climate vulnerability.