rush published after 2008. Some of them would proudly claim that they have solid farming backgrounds, conveying a down-to-earthness one would associate with “real farmers”. In total, 90 formal and ethnographic interviews with asset managers, original asset holders, industry experts, market intermediaries, regulators, non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives, farmers and farm/firm operators inform this book.
When direct access was not possible, the nature of the cases selected allowed other complimentary sources to be drawn on, such as the work of NGOs or other researchers, public information (e.g. newspapers, company websites, state registers) or private industry intelligence. For instance, I shall draw on some third-party findings when discussing the potential community impacts of some of the investments studied, since studying global agri-investment chains, their assets on the ground and the communities they are embedded into symmetrically is virtually impossible.
Structure of the book
In the next chapter, I outline how we can go about studying the finance–farming nexus. The most tempting way would be to research this nexus through the prism of “financialization” (see Ouma 2016), drawing on the wide range of writings across the social sciences and humanities that have deployed this term to make sense of the increasing and systemic power of financial markets in the global economy. I outline some of the limits found in the existing agriculture-focused literature that has worked in that register, and propose a supplementary, more practice-centred approach that allows us to arrive at an operational account of institutional landscapes. Such an approach wants to ground agri-investment chains in the materialities, socialities and spatialities of everyday life in an attempt to bring back what is often talked about in abstract and almost metaphysical terms into the realm of the tangible.
Challenging both the general and agri-focused financialization literatures’ limited historical lens, and the assumption that finance and farming present an unnatural coupling, Chapter 3 shows that farmland as “socially produced nature” in many corners of the world – especially in postcolonial environments – cannot be thought of without taking the transformative, and often-state backed, powers of globalized financial relations into account. Although most of these transformations have been based on the extension of credit to farmers, a new form of investment emerged in the 1960s: farming as part of modern portfolio management, supported by the rise of institutional investment thinking and practice. At the same time, it will be argued that ideas in and operations of modern finance have been crucially shaped by developments in land-based production.
Chapter 4 engages with the question of what we do and can know about the contemporary wave of financial expansion into farming and agriculture. It offers an attempt to open the black box of finance-gone-farming: the actors, relations and geographies underpinning farmland investments. It will become clear that finance’s run on farmland has been less Global-South-centred than many critical accounts suggest and that agri-finance capital is not a homogeneous entity but made up of various financiers with different investment cultures, fiduciary obligations and liabilities. The chapter then moves on to problematize the opacity and secrecy that characterize many of these investments.
Chapter 5 interrogates how far investment records of states may provide alternative sources of information on finance-gone-farming. This is ultimately linked to the larger question as to how financial investments into farming are regulated and accounted for. Despite the talk about the retreat of the state in a globalized economy, and the growing power of footloose finance, the state, in all its manifestations and across juridical scales, remains a central figure in the regulation of all sorts of flows critical to rendering farmland, and agricultural production more generally, investable. The regulation and state-mediated “landing” of agricultural investments in Tanzania and Aotearoa New Zealand invite us to shed light on these themes. The countries offer two starkly contrasting examples of a state’s role in turning particularly farmland into a global financial resource, exhibiting very different histories and forms of “geopower” (Parenti 2016), but also varied capacities (and willingness) to regulate and account for the new financial flows into agriculture.
Chapter 6 follows the collective, globally distributed processes buttressing the ontological reconfiguration of farming into an “alternative asset class”. It challenges the idea that finance is an amoral force by reimagining the world of asset management as one permeated by shared moral registers, norms and standards. These conventions help coordinate the actions of industry participants in light of the uncertainty attached to the future outcome of their trade and serve as higher common principles against which the legitimacy of investment decisions and the worth of a potential “asset” are assessed. In tandem with legal and technical devices, they help enact the morality of asset management. As will be shown, however, the quest to turn agriculture into an “alternative asset class” has by no means gone uncontested. The conventions structuring the world of money management have also constituted a barrier for those trying to mobilize capital from weighty institutional investors because of the size, risk profile and idiosyncratic nature of farming deals. At the same time, social forces from outside the world of asset management have challenged its stable framing as a legitimate “alternative asset class” (NGOs, activist-scholars, regulators).
Chapter 7 follows a number of investment chains into concrete agrarian environments in Tanzania and Aotearoa New Zealand. Since finance capital and investment chains are often imagined as a fait accompli in the existing debate, the task of this chapter is to unpack the socio-technical, -legal and -cultural relations and practical operations through which the journey from money to more money via agricultural production (and processing) is organized. It moves the empirical focus from abstract circuits of agri-finance capital – as in much of the structuralist literature on financialization – to the frictional enrolments for agri-finance capital formation. This process meanders between the universal aspirations of financiers and the place-based frictions and uncertainties that pose a challenge to their calculative schemes. For instance, re-resourcing agriculture into a financial asset in “emerging markets” such as Tanzania, with a largely smallholder-based economy, entails challenges that investors often do not encounter in countries with highly advanced capitalist agricultural sectors, such as Aotearoa New Zealand.
Chapter 8 zooms in on different agricultural ventures (including cases of agro-processing) in the research regions, which are part of extended and heterogeneous global investment chains. It unpacks the ontological reconfiguration of farming into a financial asset, which depends on instituting certain material, organizational, legal and technological conditions on the farming ventures acquired, through which these become financially productive. It will become clear that turning farming ventures into financial assets is not a straightforward process, as it encounters a variety of forms of recalcitrance and unforeseen obstacles. Neither is it one that is necessarily always about the maximization of shareholder value (as often posited in existing debates on financialization). In “frontier markets” such as Tanzania, investors are often forced to make a wide range of costly adjustments to their original investment calculus in order to accommodate social demands or political resistance mobilized in adjacent communities. In countries with a highly productive and technology-intensive agricultural sector such as New Zealand, investors often do not reinvent the farming wheel but mimic established industry practices, albeit with a much deeper capital structure. Surprisingly, institutionally backed investments in farmland may have a stronger sustainability ambition and track record than many domestic “family farms”. Although increased demand for farmland has led to rising land prices in many hotspots of the global land rush, some Aotearoa New Zealand farmers are active partners or advisors to foreign financiers, or need them to drive up land prices so that their own speculative endeavours can materialize. This type of farmer can be contrasted with the “Third World peasant” usually making the rounds in debates on the global land rush, who is usually presented as a victim of foreign investment activities.
Chapter 9 explores whether, despite the criticism that institutional investments in agriculture have received (touted as large-scale, productivist and poor in
