FARMING AS FINANCIAL ASSET
ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS
Series Editors: Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck, Marion Werner
Fundamental to the Economic Transformations series is the conviction that “geography matters” in the diverse ways that economies work, for whom they work, and to what ends. The so-called imperatives of globalization, the promises of development, the challenges of environmental sustainability, the dull compulsion of competitive life, the urgency of campaigns for economic rights and social justice – in all of these realms geography really matters, just as it does for a host of other contemporary concerns, from financialized growth to climate change, from green production to gender rights, from union renewal to structural adjustment. This major new series will publish on these and related issues, creating a space for interdisciplinary contributions from political economists, economic geographers, feminists, political ecologists, economic sociologists, critical development theorists, economic anthropologists, and their fellow travellers.
Published
The Doreen Massey Reader
Edited by Brett Christophers, Rebecca Lave, Jamie Peck and Marion Werner
Doreen Massey: Critical Dialogues
Edited by Marion Werner, Jamie Peck, Rebecca Lave and Brett Christophers
Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
Stefan Ouma
Market/Place: Exploring Spaces of Exchange
Edited by Christian Berndt, Jamie Peck and Norma M. Rantisi
FARMING AS FINANCIAL ASSET
Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
STEFAN OUMA
© Stefan Ouma 2020
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2020 by Agenda Publishing
Agenda Publishing Limited
The Core
Bath Lane
Newcastle Helix
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE4 5TF
ISBN 978-1-78821-187-1
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
1Introduction
2Optic: how do we study the finance–farming nexus?
3History: how old is the finance–farming nexus?
4Numbers: what we know (and do not know) about finance-gone-farming
5States: how are foreign investments in farming regulated and accounted for?
6Value(s): why has the road to “greener pastures” been so bumpy?
7Delegation: what happens inside the agri-investment chain?
8Grounding: what does assetization look like from below?
9Radices: food futures, with or without finance as we know it?
Epilogue
References
Index
This book seeks to unpack a large-scale phenomenon that has sparked a lively debate in the media, among scholars and in activist circles since 2008: the increasing interest of finance capital in all things agricultural, particularly in farmland and farming ventures. My aim in writing has been to enable non-specialist readers to delve into a subject that is often marred with technical jargon and social complexity. Finance and, by implication, how other people’s money is managed are topics too important to be left to specialists, whether they are academics or the finance professionals themselves. “Finance-gone-farming” offers a unique opportunity to study the emergence, evolution and production of a new social space – or “asset class” – through which money is used to create more money on behalf of the “better off” parts of the world, which are able to participate in capital markets. But its study also calls for historical depth, as modern finance has a much longer history in the remaking of agricultural landscapes than is often acknowledged in existing debates.
What follows has a broad interdisciplinary outlook, speaking to debates in geography, heterodox economics, sociology, anthropology, the social study of finance, agrarian studies and political ecology. Although there is a growing literature on the financialization of food and agriculture, none boasts the empirical grounding and unique field access (down to the level of invested farms) that I have negotiated over seven years of global network building. This book will also be of interest to scholars committed to opening the “black box” of investment chains and the asset/wealth management industry, as well as to those who have attempted to develop more practice-oriented understandings of “financialization” and its social and ecological consequences.
Previous work loosely informing this book is listed in the reference list. Chapter 6 in particular draws heavily on parts of that work (Ouma 2020).
A last technical remark. To ensure anonymity, I have changed the names of certain protagonists, withheld the sources of some quotes and slightly altered certain quotes. In all cases, an asterisk is used to indicate this.
The
