wealth accumulated in the present can still be harnessed for greener and more just food futures. It introduces two potential models. One is an enhanced “ESG (environmental, social and governance) model”, accompanied by technological fixes and some regulatory adjustments, which does not evade some core problems characterizing the financial present, however: the opacity of the money management industry; the unsustainable growth imperative engrained into debt-based economies; how value is imagined and produced in financial markets; the homogenizing tendencies of scale-hungry agriculture; and various inequality issues related to financial accumulation. The other model breaks in more radical ways with the temporality, sociality and materiality of modern finance and the return logic inscribed into contemporary institutional landscapes. Each of these models forces us to ask what kind of spatialized value relations are engendered by particular kinds of food futures. The book closes with an epilogue that takes us back to some of the very origins of institutional landscapes.
1.Maturity goals refer to the planned date of payment – i.e. when a liability, such as a pension or insurance payout, is due.
2.They can be contrasted with retail investors, who are individuals and who can access only certain types of financial products.
3.I use the wording “Aotearoa New Zealand” in this book in order to make visible the colonial origin of today’s nation state, a past that continues to shape the present. The addition “Aotearoa” stands for the description of the country in the language of the indigenous Māori population, which is also the second official language of the country (next to English).
4.“Studying up” implies engaging with “the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty” (Nader 1972: 289).
Optic: How do we study the finance–farming nexus?
Whither financialization?
“Financialization” has become a key term in the critical social sciences. Often used to describe a historical condition that is marked by “the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households” (Aalbers 2015: 214) over the past four decades, observers have found that almost everything has been financialized: economies, firms, sectors, public services, households, daily life, nature. In the wake of the global land rush, many scholars and activists have used the concept to make sense of finance’s growing appetite for all things agricultural (for critical reviews, see Ouma 2014, 2015b). For them, this growing interest seems to be a textbook case of geographer David Harvey’s idea of the spatio-temporal fix (Harvey 1982): after crises and devaluations in established domains of finance, capital sought greener pastures, extending its operational space into geographies and domains in which it was previously not much interested. Such a reading has gained widespread purchase. It is attractive, because it opens the debate on finance’s penetration of farming to broader questions about the boom and bust cycles of globalized capitalism and their geographical ramifications. Scholars embracing “financialization” as an analytical tool have without doubt contributed to our understanding of the rise of global finance and its implications for the “real economy”. But the reiteration of the concept across the social sciences has not been unproblematic, and some of the problems characterizing the more general debate on financialization (Christophers 2015a) also permeate the land rush debate. This results in a range of analytical and epistemological challenges, which this book seeks to address.
First, much of the literature deploys “a restricted historical optic, … thus overlooking historic parallels and (dis)continuities” (ibid.: 192). After all, finance has a long history of penetrating farming in different parts of the world. The historical examples discussed in this book will show that we must carefully examine how current phases of financialization compare to earlier operations of finance capital formation in and through farming on a global scale. Such an endeavour becomes complicated by the fact that there is not one, but multiple histories of capitalist transitions. But, as we will see, just because the finance–farming nexus has “old roots”, this does not mean that there are no “new shoots” (Sommerville 2018).
Second, owing to a rather restricted structuralist analytical lens, the existing literature has shed little light on how the agri-focused financial industry works in practice (Fairbairn 2014; Gunnoe 2014; Russi 2013; Clapp & Isakson 2018). We are yet to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution and internal architecture of “agriculture as an alternative asset class” and the socio-spatial relations and practices through which these domains are turned into financial assets. The lack of knowledge of these issues is the result of a limited engagement with financial market players among researchers. This is a result of normative and epistemological choices informing existing research strategies, as well as the existence of physical and cognitive entry barriers to a highly secretive and complex industry. With a little bit of luck and the right strategy, however, we may manage to “follow the money” (Christophers 2011) and ground agri-finance, like other trades of finance (Ho 2005), in particular places. It is in this way that we can unravel the mechanisms that bring institutional landscapes into being. Often, capital does not flow smoothly from one place to another.
Third, as I have shown with my colleagues Leigh Johnson and Patrick Bigger elsewhere (Ouma et al. 2018), the politics of information and “data” is too often sidelined in research on financialization. It can be agreed with Adeniyi Asiyanbi (2018) and Donald MacKenzie (2005) that unpacking the grounded operations of finance can help repoliticize a field that is often shrouded in complexity and technical jargon. Doing so could open spaces for broader debates, generating real answers to socio-ecological crises rather than temporary financial fixes. But how can we practically produce knowledge about the grounded operations of finance when many of its key players – the investment banks, hedge funds, private equity managers, family offices, endowments and pension funds that ought to be the objects of public scrutiny – keep their profiles low and doors closed? Such practices of non-disclosure are supported by the still overwhelming epistemic authority that financial elites command over economic matters and a global legal architecture that is tilted in favour of financial investors. Notwithstanding recent methodological attempts to trace the socio-spatiality of various forms of capital, including finance, in order to make things public (see, for example, Galaz et al. 2018), we should not underestimate the barriers to generating knowledge about finance’s operations in and beyond farming. An alternative source of information may be the state, as the ultimate guardian of cross-border flows, investment regulation and national statistics.
Fourth,
