Figure 1.1 The agri-investment chain and its share- and stakeholders

      Source: Adapted from Cotula and Blackmore (2014: 2) (reprinted with permission).

      A tale of two frontiers

      Aotearoa New Zealand is regarded as one of the prime agricultural investment frontiers globally. Together with the United States, Brazil and Australia (Luyt et al. 2013), the country has accounted for most of the individual funds and other institutional equity structures invested in primary agriculture. This is at odds with the public and academic perception that most of the financialization of farming has taken place in countries of the Global South. The country adopted neoliberal agricultural policies in 1984, with successive governments supporting foreign investment into agriculture in an effort to recapitalize indebted farms, boost export volumes and enhance efficiency. The result of more than three decades of regulatory and rural restructuring has been an influx of investors, first in forestry from the early 1990s onwards, but later on increasingly in the agricultural sector more generally. Foreign direct investments (FDIs) into farmland have sharply increased since about 2010, with the entry of pension and private equity funds into the country’s dairy, beef, wine and deciduous fruits subsectors. The country’s strong agricultural potential, well-developed farmland markets, proximity to Asian markets, significant depth in farming expertise and effective legal and contracting processes make it an “institutional-grade” investment destination. Although the state-mediated efforts of granting foreign investors access to farmland and forestry have by no means been uncontested domestically, foreign investment is often normalized in a context in which overseas connections are part of the national history and rural imaginary.

      The east African nation of Tanzania is interesting because it is considered to be one of the main “frontier markets” by financiers. Many would go as far as considering it “an ideal country for large-scale agricultural land investments due to its record of liberal economic reforms and high growth rates in the last two decades” (Bluwstein et al. 2018: 807). Despite the frenzy, frontier markets such as Tanzania are associated with particular risks that usually keep large Western institutional investors away, but they may attract more risk-taking factions of capital. Thus, the country has seen a number of private-equity-driven investments into large-scale farms over the past 15 years or so. Some of these investments have targeted former state farms from the socialist era, which have been promoted by Tanzanian state players as ready-made sites for investment. The bid to attract investors into farmland is driven by a larger agricultural transformation agenda that aims at modernizing the largely “peasant-based” agricultural sector of the country, which has, however, attracted considerable criticism from civil society organizations within and outside Tanzania. This conflict-ridden transition context makes Tanzania an ideal setting for studying the articulation of global agri-investment chains with local agrarian, economic and political-institutional settings.

      Producing knowledge about institutional landscapes

The first part of the research informing this book included participant observation of agricultural investment conferences, the analysis of hundreds of industry intelligence and investment brochures, and interviews with key players in the agricultural investment scene. The second part followed specific investment chains into two main frontier regions of the finance-driven land rush, Aotearoa New Zealand and Tanzania. The grounding of particular investment chains in these distinct geographical contexts also allows us to place the contemporary drive of financial expansion into agriculture into a longer history of metropolitan financial expansion and place making in colonial and settler-colonial contexts. Moving back and forth between the macro and the micro, this book will ground agri-finance investment chains in specific sites, but seeks to “study up”⁴ their workings at the same time. Obviously, such a research strategy comes at a price. It not only tends to lose sight of those affected by the workings of the powerful (e.g. workers in farming ventures, adjacent communities, other farmers) but also encounters many challenges in practice owing to the secretive nature of the money management industry. Many of the players involved – especially private equity funds – are exempt from comprehensive reporting because of their private nature (unlike stock listed enterprises) or are bound to confidentiality agreements as a result of their fiduciary duties. These limits to knowledge production will become repeatedly visible in the narrative that follows. The words of an eminent scholar of modern financial markets, sociologist Donald MacKenzie, capture this problem well:

      Those who conduct interviews to open black boxes may gain insight but may lose the capacity to condemn, while those who condemn, at the cost of insight, may end up condemning ineffectually, or condemning the wrong things. Certainly, though, the opening of black boxes is no panacea. It is a technique of research, and like all such techniques also a political act, one fraught with ambiguity and with compromise.

      (MacKenzie 2005: 570)

      This said, it has been surprisingly easy to gain access to many informants from the world of money management via a mixture of personal networks, unmediated e-mail contacts, physical contacts at investment conferences and (sometimes) straightforward farm visits. Many of the people interviewed for this book were happy to talk about their trade and were supportive of the research. None of them was the “typical investment banker” or interviewee one would have expected after reading the first scholarly engagements with the finance-driven land rush published after 2008. Some of them would proudly claim that they have solid farming backgrounds, conveying a down-to-earthness one would associate with “real farmers”. In total, 90 formal and ethnographic interviews with asset managers, original asset holders, industry experts, market intermediaries, regulators, non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives, farmers and farm/firm operators inform this book.

      When direct access was not possible, the nature of the cases selected allowed other complimentary sources to be drawn on, such as the work of NGOs or other researchers, public information (e.g. newspapers, company websites, state registers) or private industry intelligence. For instance, I shall draw on some third-party findings when discussing the potential community impacts of some of the investments studied, since studying global agri-investment chains, their assets on the ground and the communities they are embedded into symmetrically is virtually impossible.

      Structure of the book

      In the next chapter, I outline how we can go about studying the finance–farming nexus. The most tempting way would be to research this nexus through the prism of “financialization” (see Ouma 2016), drawing on the wide range of writings across the social sciences and humanities that have deployed this term to make sense of the increasing and systemic power of financial markets in the global economy. I outline some of the limits found in the existing agriculture-focused literature that has worked in that register, and propose a supplementary, more practice-centred approach that allows us to arrive at an operational account of institutional landscapes. Such an approach wants to ground agri-investment chains in the materialities, socialities and spatialities of everyday life in an attempt to bring back what is often talked about in abstract and almost metaphysical terms into the realm of the tangible.

      Challenging both the general and agri-focused financialization literatures’ limited historical lens, and the assumption that finance and farming present an unnatural coupling, Chapter 3 shows that farmland as “socially produced nature” in many corners of the world – especially in postcolonial environments – cannot be thought of without taking the transformative, and often-state backed, powers of globalized financial relations into account. Although most of these transformations have been based on the extension of credit to farmers, a new form of investment emerged in the 1960s: farming as part of modern portfolio management, supported by the rise of institutional investment