Farming as Financial Asset. Stefan Ouma
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as it implies an “analysis of the constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable … [finance] to derive benefits from resources” (ibid.).
As we shall see for the case studies of Aotearoa New Zealand and Tanzania, relations of access in the frontier regions of finance-driven investments into farming are more complex and contested than often suggested in the current debate. For instance, social forces such as NGOs or the media, from abroad as well as from within, have questioned the morality or economic reasoning behind farmland investments. In addition, states often play more ambivalent roles than being mere facilitators for financial investors.
Fifth, more structuralist accounts often tend to overlook the fact that economizing farming in a profitable manner often turns out to be a challenging project on the ground. Agricultural production as a localized, biogeophysical and risk-prone venture may pose challenges to any investment plan (Mann & Dickinson 1978). Indeed, there is growing evidence that many investments do not proceed as envisaged by investors (Cotula 2013; Li 2015; Locher & Sulle 2014; Grain 2018). As we shall see in this book, the intended transformation of nature into a financial asset is not a mere technical problem (Li 2014). Often, demands by investors need to be balanced with those of local stakeholders, such as labour, adjacent communities or the state. The extraction of financial value from farming is as much a political process as it is a technical one (Ducastel & Anseeuw 2017).
Sixth, we are yet to examine the financialization of farming for its global value relations (Araghi 2003) and associated inequality dimensions in a more explicit and sustained way. Even though this is a grand topic in its own right, the book tries to partly fill this gap, by connecting current debates on global value relations, inequality and “imperial lifestyles” (Brand & Wissen 2017) to finance’s expansion into the world of farming. The transformation of agricultural ventures into a financial asset ties the reproduction of certain social classes to the circulation of capital in and through nature: the fee-collecting financial elites engaged in money management; the HNWIs, institutions and endowments investing their money in green financial products; the “‘mass affluent’ in national middle classes” (Seabrooke & Wigan 2017: 13) who entrust their money to pension funds and life insurance companies targeting various forms of nature; and the populations in core capitalist countries (including Gulf states and China) more generally, whose huge aggregate ecological foot- and hoofprint (Weis 2013) continues to enlarge despite claims that it is compensated for elsewhere.
Finally, there remains the big question of how other kinds of food futures can be organized. What role should finance play therein at a moment when our social and socio-natural relationships are urgently in need of “‘protection’ from unfettered markets, but, in a significant twist …, markets, private investors and entrepreneurship are held out as the very means for providing that protection” (Langley 2020: 143)? There is ample evidence that dominant paradigms of agricultural production, which also often materialize in institutionally backed farming ventures, need to be radically rethought in order to create more sustainable and inter-/intra-generationally just food futures (see, for example, Cassidy et al. 2013; Grey & Patel 2015; Marsden & Morley 2015; Lawrence 2017). Since the giant amounts of capital administered by institutions worldwide will not go away anytime soon, and the time left to create more sustainable economic–ecological relationships is quickly slipping away, the possibility of whether such giant amounts of money can be remobilized to that end should be explored (Castree & Christophers 2015; Knuth 2017). Can finance be “smart” (Palmer 2015) in radically different ways?
Towards an operational account of institutional landscapes
Unpacking the practical activities of finance in situ has been the prime goal of an interdisciplinary field popularized as the social studies of finance (see, for example, Langley 2008; MacKenzie 2005; Preda 2013; Pryke & Du Gay 2007). Insights from this field can breathe fresh air into the study of “finance-gone-farming”. Even though not explicitly rooted in that intellectual tradition, Martin et al. (2008: 128) capture the gist of such a programme quite well: “Reckoning finance into a practical activity discloses capital’s own methods such that they might be both reappropriated and redeployed …” They continue: “[I]t is an effort to specify what capital’s movement does, both to itself and across a whole range of social sites and activities” (ibid.: 129).
Embracing more practice-attuned approaches to study the multiple activities of global finance, however, risks denying “analytical validity to the category of capital” (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013: 10) and capitalism more generally (Leyshon & Thrift 2007; Preda 2013). In this regard, the social studies of finance have attracted the same sort of criticism as their related field, the social studies of economization and marketization (see, for example, Fine 2003; Christophers 2014). A useful bridging concept in this regard is that of “operations of capital”, recently developed by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, 2015, 2019). Speaking from a critical political economy perspective that has had fruitful encounters with practice-oriented thinking, it helps develop a grounded understanding of the historio-geographically variegated operations of “global finance”:
Using the concept of operations of capital … opens a new angle for the critical analysis of the relation between capital and capitalism. An operation always refers to specific capitalist actors while also being embedded in a wider network of operations and relations that involve other actors, processes, and structures. This gives us two analytical avenues through which to examine the work done by an operation. The first, with its reference to specific capitalist actors, reveals the workings of capital in particular material configurations, shedding light on processes of valorization as well as on the frictions and tensions crisscrossing them in lived and grounded circumstances. The second focuses on the articulation of operations into larger and changing formations that comprise capitalism as a whole.
(Mezzadra & Neilson 2015: 6–7)
Thus, an operations of capital analytics does not solely focus on the everyday practices of finance – finance as work. Operations are quotidian and abstract at once, as they speak to the shared legal frameworks, conventions, metrics and rationalities of the global finance industry. These are recursively enacted in the everyday practices of financial economization, invoking a relation between the “micro” and the “macro”. It is through such operations, and the practices they come along with, that institutional landscapes emerge as material effects. In the case of this book, this implies moving back and forth between ethnography and world history (Hart & Ortiz