Farming as Financial Asset. Stefan Ouma
Читать онлайн книгу.
that is marked by “the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households” (Aalbers 2015: 214) over the past four decades, observers have found that almost everything has been financialized: economies, firms, sectors, public services, households, daily life, nature. In the wake of the global land rush, many scholars and activists have used the concept to make sense of finance’s growing appetite for all things agricultural (for critical reviews, see Ouma 2014, 2015b). For them, this growing interest seems to be a textbook case of geographer David Harvey’s idea of the spatio-temporal fix (Harvey 1982): after crises and devaluations in established domains of finance, capital sought greener pastures, extending its operational space into geographies and domains in which it was previously not much interested. Such a reading has gained widespread purchase. It is attractive, because it opens the debate on finance’s penetration of farming to broader questions about the boom and bust cycles of globalized capitalism and their geographical ramifications. Scholars embracing “financialization” as an analytical tool have without doubt contributed to our understanding of the rise of global finance and its implications for the “real economy”. But the reiteration of the concept across the social sciences has not been unproblematic, and some of the problems characterizing the more general debate on financialization (Christophers 2015a) also permeate the land rush debate. This results in a range of analytical and epistemological challenges, which this book seeks to address.
First, much of the literature deploys “a restricted historical optic, … thus overlooking historic parallels and (dis)continuities” (ibid.: 192). After all, finance has a long history of penetrating farming in different parts of the world. The historical examples discussed in this book will show that we must carefully examine how current phases of financialization compare to earlier operations of finance capital formation in and through farming on a global scale. Such an endeavour becomes complicated by the fact that there is not one, but multiple histories of capitalist transitions. But, as we will see, just because the finance–farming nexus has “old roots”, this does not mean that there are no “new shoots” (Sommerville 2018).
Second, owing to a rather restricted structuralist analytical lens, the existing literature has shed little light on how the agri-focused financial industry works in practice (Fairbairn 2014; Gunnoe 2014; Russi 2013; Clapp & Isakson 2018). We are yet to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution and internal architecture of “agriculture as an alternative asset class” and the socio-spatial relations and practices through which these domains are turned into financial assets. The lack of knowledge of these issues is the result of a limited engagement with financial market players among researchers. This is a result of normative and epistemological choices informing existing research strategies, as well as the existence of physical and cognitive entry barriers to a highly secretive and complex industry. With a little bit of luck and the right strategy, however, we may manage to “follow the money” (Christophers 2011) and ground agri-finance, like other trades of finance (Ho 2005), in particular places. It is in this way that we can unravel the mechanisms that bring institutional landscapes into being. Often, capital does not flow smoothly from one place to another.
Third, as I have shown with my colleagues Leigh Johnson and Patrick Bigger elsewhere (Ouma et al. 2018), the politics of information and “data” is too often sidelined in research on financialization. It can be agreed with Adeniyi Asiyanbi (2018) and Donald MacKenzie (2005) that unpacking the grounded operations of finance can help repoliticize a field that is often shrouded in complexity and technical jargon. Doing so could open spaces for broader debates, generating real answers to socio-ecological crises rather than temporary financial fixes. But how can we practically produce knowledge about the grounded operations of finance when many of its key players – the investment banks, hedge funds, private equity managers, family offices, endowments and pension funds that ought to be the objects of public scrutiny – keep their profiles low and doors closed? Such practices of non-disclosure are supported by the still overwhelming epistemic authority that financial elites command over economic matters and a global legal architecture that is tilted in favour of financial investors. Notwithstanding recent methodological attempts to trace the socio-spatiality of various forms of capital, including finance, in order to make things public (see, for example, Galaz et al. 2018), we should not underestimate the barriers to generating knowledge about finance’s operations in and beyond farming. An alternative source of information may be the state, as the ultimate guardian of cross-border flows, investment regulation and national statistics.
Fourth, much of the existing literature has 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