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2 Brazil's biomes Source: Bill Nelson. Adaptation of Brazil Travel, "Map of Biomes of Brazil." Used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Fields of Gold critically examines the history, ideas, and political struggles surrounding the financialization of farmland. In particular, Madeleine Fairbairn focuses on developments in two of the most popular investment locations, the US and Brazil, looking at the implications of financiers' acquisition of land and control over resources for rura...
Citations
... But the current context has brought in other social forces that are equally, if not more, vicious. These include new corporate land grabbers, both transnational and domestic; cross-border noncorporate but pervasive individual land buyers, such as big farmers, brokers, renters, scammers, swindlers, and a "land ma a"(Sud 2014;Levien 2021); nancial entities, including pension funds(Clapp 2014;Fairbairn 2014Fairbairn , 2020Isakson 2014); the use of hypermodern digital technology in land and food systems(Fraser 2019); an array of nontraditional agricultural investors, ranging from auto companies to livestock processors; and big-time conservationists (Brockington and Du y 2011; Arsel and Büscher 2012). ...
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... Critical agrarian studies is increasingly shaped through scholar activism, centering the ongoing work of peasant and rural labor movement. CAS, while still attentive to the role of the peasant and other rural laborers, places less direct emphasis on class struggle per se, rather looking toward the multifaceted ways agrarian capitalism is territorialized and circulates through global financial flows, commodity and land markets, and labor arrangements (Fairbairn 2020;Guthman 2004). ...
This article recasts agrarian studies’ concerns with nature, productivity, and subjectivity through the provocations raised by transgender Marxism. Transgender Marxism has interrogated how normative gender, sexuality, and racial dynamics are inseparable from the material and reproductive matrices required for capital. Critical agrarian studies has a long history of carefully tracing out the political economy of agrarian capitalism and resistance to it. Engaging with the unruly materialisms of transgender Marxism would further the work of critical agrarian studies, particularly in regard to the ways gender and sexuality are taken up in the field. The project of transgender Marxism offers a scathing critique of rights-based recognition, hetero- and homonormativity, apoliticized science, and the ways in which the biological family figures at the heart of capitalist reproduction. Such questions have been taken up in small corners of queer and feminist critical agrarian studies, particularly those rooted in the United States, but transgender Marxism offers a new opportunity to bring together the material and historical concerns of the ways agrarian capitalism takes place and creates conditions for unruly forms of resistance. The article demonstrates their possible interconnectivities by exploring three themes: theories of change, the centrality of gender/sex in the agrarian, and unruly, ungrounded materialisms. While primarily a theoretical intervention, the article draws some insights from the authors’ ethnographic work in Paraguay and Colombia to ground the theoretical possibilities in place.
... Land grabbing can occur without a land rush; a land rush always entails land grabbing, and more. The term land rush is commonly used in the scholarly literature during the past decade or so (Fairbairn, 2020;Hall, Scoones and Tsikata, 2015;Scoones et al 2013;Oya, 2013;Cotula, 2013;Wolford et al, 2013;Hall, 2011;among others). Ghis has helped us understand the workings of global capitalism better. ...
... With land as the 'new gold' (Fairbairn 2020), the extraordinarily complex network of players involved in land deals has expanded. Finance houses across the world are linked to pension funds, insurance companies and private and state investors of all types in ways that are opaque and sometimes illegal. ...
... Financialization in the food system -or the growing and changing roles of financial actors, their motives and institutions along the food supply chain -has attracted significant scholarly interest since the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Scholars have critically analyzed how increased financialization impacts food price volatility in commodity markets, farmland ownership and corporate concentration along the food value chain (Fairbairn, 2020;Magnan, 2015;Clapp & Martin, 2013;McMichael, 2012;Clapp & Isakson, 2018). They have also examined how dominant financial actors and motives are reshaping traditional grocery retailing (Baud & Durand, 2012;Burch & Lawrence, 2005). ...
During the past five years, the e-grocery sector in China has experienced double-digit growth which accelerated at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Part of this hypergrowth was fueled by changing consumption patterns and pandemic-induced demand for contactless food delivery. However, this study highlights two other important but understudied drivers of the e-grocery boom -the rising financial investment and the deepening engagement of dot-com companies in the food retail sector. This study characterizes the recent financial investments in China’s e-grocery sector and analyzes the food security implications, which contributes to the scholarly literature on financialization, corporate power, and digitization in the food system in novel ways. This study advances three research findings: a) the e-grocery sector has become a new site of financialization in the food sector; b) this new site was developed partly through pandemic-induced demand for food delivery and partly as a by-product of the expansion of China’s dot-com economy; c) by the last quarter of 2021 and in 2022, many investors fled China’s e-grocery sector after an anti-trust crackdown was launched and as most e-grocery businesses struggled to make a profit. Overall, the boom and bust of the e-grocery bubble in China posed multiple challenges to food security, such as causing cash flow crises for grocery suppliers and compromising fair competition in the grocery market. Furthermore, the twin processes of financialization and digitization have forged a mutually reinforcing relationship that has far-reaching implications for China’s food system as a whole.
... A policy goal to create newness may be continually in tension with a deeper agrarianism whose main function is preservation and the promotion of homogeneity. This agrarianism is a contributing factor to a food system characterized by homogenous racial ownership (Horst & Marion 2018;Shoemaker 2021), land consolidation (Fairbairn 2020), corporate concentration (Clapp 2022), and landscape simplification (Petersen-Rockney et al. 2021). Inviting farmers into this system without engaging with the ongoing logics that produce outcomes of homogenization may have consequences for the stated aims of generational renewal. ...
New entrant policy, literature, and research offers an important angle for exploring where dominant agrarianism is reproduced and contested. As new entrants seek access to land, finance, and expertise, their credibility is filtered through a cultural and policy environment that favors some farming models over others. Thus, seemingly apolitical policy tools geared at getting new people into farming may carry implicit norms of who these individuals should be, how they should farm, and what their values should entail. A normative gaze of farming often masks the financial, cultural, labor relation, and land tenure dimensions that are the underlying drivers of agrarian change. This paper applies social reproduction theory to explore a diversity of social labor processes that new entrant farmers practice to arrive at the point of agricultural production. Interviews with new entrant and successor farmers in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) are presented first, followed by an analysis of new entrant policy instruments over the last two decades in Scotland. We find that new entrant policy fails to engage with a crisis of social reproduction in the food system because of a commitment to agrarian ideals of the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial farmer. By inviting newcomers into a dynamic of increasing precarious and uncompensated labor, very often by way of family relations, new entrant policy may act as a form of “predatory inclusion.” We argue that to be successful in reproducing the agricultural sector, new entrant farmer policy must be first a policy at attending to relations in the social sphere. Recognizing and supporting the diversified strategies farmers take on to assemble land for production would not only drive more just policy, but set the conditions for a more adaptive food system.
... Land regimesestablished patterns of rules on how to govern access, use, control, and ownership of land across sectors and in the rural-urban continuumare thus questioned, reinterpreted, recast, or disregarded amid increasing unruliness causing, and at the same time an outcome of, wild speculation and the spectacularization of potential fortunes that can be derived from seizing blocks of land or territories. This can happen either physically or through a variety of mechanisms of land control grabbing, directly or indirectly, especially in the era of financialization and digitization when effective control of land may well be seized by distant, depersonalized finance capital (Clapp and Isakson 2018;Fairbairn 2020;Fraser 2019;Ouma 2016;Salerno 2017), prompting Ashwood and colleagues to ask 'what owns the land?' (Ashwood et al. 2022). This is all part of a process of 'rendering land investible', in the words of Tania Li (2017), and usually occurs quickly, within a particular historical juncture. ...
... Through focusing on the interaction of forestry and farming I aim to address a gap in the land grabbing literature. Fairbairn (2020) writes that 'we are now witnessing a 'financialization of farmland' and this paper provides another example of this, although the investment in farmland in this case is a) in order to convert it to forestry and b) not just for financialised profits, but for the purpose of producing profitable commodities. In Wales, farmland is profitable, but farming not so much. ...
... In Wales, farmland is profitable, but farming not so much. The global land rush of the 2010s was partly based on high grain prices (Fairbairn 2020), in the UK today, in this instance, it is partly based on the demand for British timber. A market with considerable potential for growth. ...
Taking advantage of post-Brexit uncertainty for the agricultural sector, newly established investment funds are buying up small farms in Wales as part of a 'new enclosures'. Land is acquired with the plan to convert to commercial forestry, management outsourced to professional contractors, and with the aim to garner government subsidies, the sale of carbon credits and to profit from timber products and eco-tourism. This paper will detail and analyse this new process of financialised land grabs, its effects on small farms in Wales, and its potential consequences for the Welsh countryside and food production, and for goals of global climate justice. This form of land grabbing is a novel form in the historical development of the agrarian question in the context of Wales and the UK and represents a deepening of the capitalisation and financialisation of the countryside, all in service of corporate greenwashing. We are yet to see the exact path it will take but this paper will seek to understand the current situation and potential directions, with the aim of aiding political movements so they may formulate effective responses before such a process of dispossession can be allowed to further take hold.
Firstly, I will outline the political economic environment of Welsh land and agriculture, and the context for investment fund land grabs via forestry. Secondly, I will outline land grabbing and carbon markets. Thirdly, I will explicate the financial strategy of Foresight Sustainable Forestry Company PLC 1 and how they seek to capitalise upon carbon markets, post-Brexit agricultural policies, rural economic crisis and demands for British timber production. Thirdly, I will explore some of the local, national and global consequences of carbon offsetting and land grabs. Finally, I will identify (actual and potential) resistance and alternatives, and the wider ramifications for green transitions and movements for food sovereignty.
... Increased interest from institutional investors in including real property in their portfolio, along with regulatory changes, has opened up the possibilities for securitization and standardization of real property assets, thereby increasing the scope of investment opportunities in the sector. While, in principle, land is an extremely illiquid and heterogeneous asset class, financialization processes that integrate landed property into financial channels through various financing and participation models can create 'liquidity out of spatial fixity' (Gotham, 2009, p. 357) through a variety of financial conventions together with legal and technical devices (Gotham, 2009;van Loon and Aalbers, 2017;Fairbairn, 2020;Ouma, 2020). Scholarly interest in landed property as a target of institutional investors has grown in recent years, and the investors themselves as well as their strategies have received considerable attention, too (Haila, 1991;Lizieri, 2009;Gunnoe, 2014;van Loon and Aalbers, 2017). ...
Previous literature on the nexus between land, finance and business power has not systematically analysed the role of the liquidity of businesses’ assets. Combining process tracing with a comparative design, this study contributes a perspective on the role of standardized assets for business power. It investigates land acquisition tax reforms asking why institutional landowners’ structural and instrumental power was successful in Sweden but not in Germany. In Germany, a reform was passed in 2021 which disadvantages the private market institutional landowners compared to their public counterparts. This study argues that the standardization of landed property as liquid stock enabled publicly listed property companies to unite with other stock market actors, increasing their power resources and allowing them to successfully promote their interests due to the liquidity demands of their assets. This stands in contrast to the poorer reception of the liquidity of private market actors in their land-related transactions.
... Debt can augment production by disciplining labour and by privatising household social reproduction, thereby subsidising capital accumulation (Soederberg, 2014). Moreover, by eschewing questions of production, the explanatory remit of a financial ecologies approach is curtailed in geographic regions where households who depend on resource-based livelihoods have become indebted in recent years (Fairbairn, 2020;Green, 2022a;Watts & Scales, 2020). Smallholder farmers in particular have long been targeted for inclusion into formal financial markets, both in the Global North and South (Bernards, 2022). ...
... Specifically, the tendency to treat private property as a financial asset opens land to speculative pressure (Christophers, 2010;Harvey, 1982). Speculation on farmland often ends in periodic crashes, with farmers driven off their land as they become over-leveraged, defaulting on their loans (Fairbairn, 2020;Gerber, 2014;Green, 2019;Li, 2014;Natarajan & Brickell, 2022). Exploring how capital circulation through land is either enabled, or impeded, by the specific characteristics of credit-debt relations within agrarian financial ecologies is a crucial step towards explaining the uneven outcomes of debt geographies. ...
... First, it highlights the relationship between land and financial markets, demonstrating that they are tightly linked through processes of production. Specifically, it helps to explain how the mortgage of land influences the geographic patterns of capital investment in the countryside (Fairbairn, 2020;Ouma, 2020). Second, an agrarian financial ecologies approach focuses attention on questions related to value within financial markets. ...
There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio-spatial outcomes, namely debt-driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.
