ABSTRACT

Despite the significant coverage the financialization of farmland and agriculture has received in the media, activist circles and academia alike, there remain some striking empirical lacunae. Against this backdrop, the aim of this chapter is to provide a more detailed understanding of global finance’s new entanglements with farmland. It does so by first engaging with the complex dynamics underlying the finance-driven version of the global land rush, offering a historical and actor-centred account of the evolution of the ‘farmland asset class’. It then critically examines some of the common fallacies in many early accounts of ‘finance-gone-farming’. The main argument advanced here is that the assetization of farmland/agriculture has been less coherent, straightforward, and effective than the critical literature on this phenomenon suggests. The reason for this lies in the idiosyncratic and political nature of farmland, which poses a problem for the operations of modern financial markets.

The chapter opens some of the so-called ‘black boxes’ that characterizes the contemporary literature. First, it provides insights into the uneven geographies of the finance-driven land rush. Second, this contribution will shed more light on the actual ‘investment process’, particularly on the contractual relationships, risk-return management and value extraction practices, as well as exit strategies embraced in the emerging farmland asset class. Third, it engages with the role of intermediaries, which have been crucial market-makers. The overall argument guiding this latter part of the chapter is that opening the black box of finance-gone-farming can contribute to a project that some have called ‘technical democracy’.