ABSTRACT

This chapter revisits two compelling questions in current debates around agri-food financialization: (i) to what degree is financialization a ‘new’ phenomenon affecting agri-food systems, or might it rather be considered an extension or resurgence of past trends? And (ii) how might a ‘middle path’ between structuralist and practice-oriented accounts of the phenomenon best be deployed to advance understandings of rural transformation in a given region? To answer these questions, I draw on a case study of the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan, where recent scholarly work has been relatively unique globally for its exploration of the relationships between new agri-food investment vehicles and shifts in local farming practices. I demonstrate that while this emergent research has begun to embed financialization within longer-term trajectories of agrarian restructuring in the prairie region, it could still go further towards providing a thickened local history of financialization that recognizes farmers as among its key agents. I make a modest start at this task by considering how financialization is transforming the cultures and subjectivities of prairie farmers, thereby conditioning their responses to the new investment vehicles as well as their differential engagement in parallel restructuring processes.