Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes

Stefan Ouma

doi:10.1017/9781788211888

Since the global financial crisis, the world has seen a stark rise in financial investment in farming and agricultural production. Indeed, finance has been identified as one of the main causes of the so-called 'global land rush'. In a world with a growing population that needs to be fed, the financial returns from agriculture are sold as safe bets. The debate that this has prompted has been frequently alarmist, with financiers blamed for rising land prices, corporate enclosures, the dispossession of smallholder farmers and the expansion of large-scale industrial agriculture.

Stefan Ouma speaks to these concerns via an ethnographic journey through the agrifocused asset management industry. His penetrating analysis of case studies taken from New Zealand and Tanzania allows him to put global finance 'in place', bringing into view the flesh-and-blood institutions, globe spanning social relations, everyday practices and place-based value struggles that are often absent in broad-brushed narratives on the 'financialization of agriculture'. The book closes with a key question for the Anthropocene: which form of finance forwhich kind of food future?

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Farming as Financial Asset

Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes

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Contents

Frontmatter
pp i-iv

Contents
pp v-vi

Preface
pp vii-viii

Acknowledgements
pp ix-x

List of illustrations
pp xi-xii

1 - Introduction
pp 1-14

2 - Optic: how do we study the finance– farming nexus?
pp 15-24

3 - History: how old is the finance– farming nexus?
pp 25-44

4 - Numbers: what we know (and do not know) about finance-gone-farming
pp 45-68

5 - States: how are foreign investments in farming regulated and accounted for?
pp 69-92

6 - Value(s): why has the road to “greener pastures” been so bumpy?
pp 93-110

7 - Delegation: what happens inside the agri-investment chain?
pp 111-136

8 - Grounding: what does assetization look like from below?
pp 137-166

9 - Radices: food futures, with or without finance as we know it?
pp 167-180

Epilogue
pp 181-182

References
pp 183-204

Index
pp 205-208

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Farming as Financial Asset

Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes

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