focused on a few selected examples in the core regions of the Global North, particularly in North America (Fairbairn 2014; Sommerville & Magnan 2015; Gunnoe 2014). Even though a few authors have recently offered treatments of the financialization of farming in places such as Australia (Sippel 2015; Larder et al. 2015) and Brazil (Fairbairn 2015), we are yet to see more nuanced accounts of “the real life incarnation of finance in the sector by looking at investment arrangements, including connections with the state, and its (regional) variations” (Visser et al. 2015: 541). What happens if we start researching the new finance–farmland nexus in Zambia, Tanzania, Romania or Aotearoa New Zealand? Might accounts from “the margins” not requalify existing understandings of “financialization”? Such accounts from the margins are not just ones of capitalist accumulation dynamics produced in a so-called “periphery” (Shivji 2009) but accounts that aim at decentring histories of capitalism written in epistemic centres such as North America or Europe in relation to “other spaces” (Taylor 2010). From such a perspective, even “Northern countries” such as Aotearoa New Zealand or Australia would count as “margins” because they have featured strongly neither in the prominent literature on financialization nor in the literature on its agrarian variant (for exceptions, see Le Heron 2013; Magnan 2015; Sippel et al. 2017). As this book will show, expanding the empirical focus in the study of the finance-driven land rush, and utilizing a more contextual understanding of the workings of “global finance”, allows us to unpack how global agri-finance chains materialize within concrete geographical settings with distinct histories. It also helps us shed light on how investors gain access to farming properties in market environments with different agrarian, economic and political-institutional features, and how such contextual features affect the strategies of investors and asset managers. This in turn necessitates coming to terms with both the productive and constraining power of investment and property regimes as well as the modalities of state–investor relations in target regions, since these regulate investors’ access to natural “resources” (Bridge 2014). The emphasis on access, defined here as “the ability to derive benefits from things” (Ribot & Peluso 2003: 153), is important, as it implies an “analysis of the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable … [finance] to derive benefits from resources” (ibid.).
As we shall see for the case studies of Aotearoa New Zealand and Tanzania, relations of access in the frontier regions of finance-driven investments into farming are more complex and contested than often suggested in the current debate. For instance, social forces such as NGOs or the media, from abroad as well as from within, have questioned the morality or economic reasoning behind farmland investments. In addition, states often play more ambivalent roles than being mere facilitators for financial investors.
Fifth, more structuralist accounts often tend to overlook the fact that economizing farming in a profitable manner often turns out to be a challenging project on the ground. Agricultural production as a localized, biogeophysical and risk-prone venture may pose challenges to any investment plan (Mann & Dickinson 1978). Indeed, there is growing evidence that many investments do not proceed as envisaged by investors (Cotula 2013; Li 2015; Locher & Sulle 2014; Grain 2018). As we shall see in this book, the intended transformation of nature into a financial asset is not a mere technical problem (Li 2014). Often, demands by investors need to be balanced with those of local stakeholders, such as labour, adjacent communities or the state. The extraction of financial value from farming is as much a political process as it is a technical one (Ducastel & Anseeuw 2017).
Sixth, we are yet to examine the financialization of farming for its global value relations (Araghi 2003) and associated inequality dimensions in a more explicit and sustained way. Even though this is a grand topic in its own right, the book tries to partly fill this gap, by connecting current debates on global value relations, inequality and “imperial lifestyles” (Brand & Wissen 2017) to finance’s expansion into the world of farming. The transformation of agricultural ventures into a financial asset ties the reproduction of certain social classes to the circulation of capital in and through nature: the fee-collecting financial elites engaged in money management; the HNWIs, institutions and endowments investing their money in green financial products; the “‘mass affluent’ in national middle classes” (Seabrooke & Wigan 2017: 13) who entrust their money to pension funds and life insurance companies targeting various forms of nature; and the populations in core capitalist countries (including Gulf states and China) more generally, whose huge aggregate ecological foot- and hoofprint (Weis 2013) continues to enlarge despite claims that it is compensated for elsewhere.
Finally, there remains the big question of how other kinds of food futures can be organized. What role should finance play therein at a moment when our social and socio-natural relationships are urgently in need of “‘protection’ from unfettered markets, but, in a significant twist …, markets, private investors and entrepreneurship are held out as the very means for providing that protection” (Langley 2020: 143)? There is ample evidence that dominant paradigms of agricultural production, which also often materialize in institutionally backed farming ventures, need to be radically rethought in order to create more sustainable and inter-/intra-generationally just food futures (see, for example, Cassidy et al. 2013; Grey & Patel 2015; Marsden & Morley 2015; Lawrence 2017). Since the giant amounts of capital administered by institutions worldwide will not go away anytime soon, and the time left to create more sustainable economic–ecological relationships is quickly slipping away, the possibility of whether such giant amounts of money can be remobilized to that end should be explored (Castree & Christophers 2015; Knuth 2017). Can finance be “smart” (Palmer 2015) in radically different ways?
Towards an operational account of institutional landscapes
Unpacking the practical activities of finance in situ has been the prime goal of an interdisciplinary field popularized as the social studies of finance (see, for example, Langley 2008; MacKenzie 2005; Preda 2013; Pryke & Du Gay 2007). Insights from this field can breathe fresh air into the study of “finance-gone-farming”. Even though not explicitly rooted in that intellectual tradition, Martin et al. (2008: 128) capture the gist of such a programme quite
