Farming as financial asset: global finance and the making of institutional landscapes /

222 Pages·8.725 MB·English

by  Stefan Ouma.

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FARMING AS FINANCIAL ASSET
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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-c alled 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/P lace: Exploring Spaces of Exchange
Edited by Christian Berndt, Jamie Peck and Norma M. Rantisi
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FARMING AS FINANCIAL ASSET

Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
STEFAN OUMA
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© 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
www.agendapub.com
ISBN 978- 1- 78821- 187- 1
Open access publication co-funded by the German Research Council (DFG), via the
project “The Rise of Agriculture as an ‘Alternative Asset Class’: Global Economies of
Financial Economization”, 2017–21; grant number: 363300598; co-funding: University
of Bayreuth
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
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CONTENTS

Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
List of illustrations xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Optic: how do we study the finance– farming nexus? 15
3 History: how old is the finance– farming nexus? 25
4 Numbers: what we know (and do not know) about
finance-gone-farming 45
5 States: how are foreign investments in farming regulated and
accounted for? 69
6 Value(s): why has the road to “greener pastures” been so bumpy? 93
7 Delegation: what happens inside the agri- investment chain? 111
8 Grounding: what does assetization look like from below? 137
9 Radices: food futures, with or without finance as we know it? 167
Epilogue 181
References 183
Index 205
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PREFACE

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 his-
torical 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-o riented 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.
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