Finance, Land and Labour

Abstract

The dynamics of contemporary capitalism have empowered the role and influence of finance within the realm of agriculture. In response, agri-finance research has focused on the extension of global finance's investment chains and how parts of the agricultural sector—mainly farmland—are transformed into financial assets, where multiple sources of capital seek to make gains. To do so, scholarship on ‘finance going farming’ has directed attention to the variety of financial actors (i.e., pension, endowment and private equity funds, insurance companies and investment banks); their motives to invest; the variegated mechanisms deployed to reformat farmland and agricultural production for financial purposes; and the increasing power of shareholders to shape productive and distributive decisions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of how finance makes its way into agriculture, within agrarian studies, these processes and dynamics raise important conceptual and methodological challenges about how to centre financialization in dynamics of agrarian change. In this exchange, our contributors consider how contemporary trends in agri-finance demand us to rethink relations of production, property and power and processes of accumulation. Key questions that the forum addresses include how and to what extent is finance connected to the restructuring of capital and its modalities of accumulation in agrarian settings? What ties does financialization have to changes in labour regimes? How does it affect productive capital and its associated relations of power? This Forum is part of the 25th Anniversary Forums¹, following ‘How is climate change changing agrarian studies?’ (Paprocki et al. 2025), ‘Challenging agroecology—Promise and pitfalls for agrarian studies’ (McKay et al. 2025) and ‘What is the value of value for agrarian studies’ (Akram-Lodhi et al. 2025).

The growing hegemony of finance has been reshaping the mechanisms through which land and nature are appropriated. In global agriculture, institutional investors—such as pension funds, insurance companies, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds—have become central actors in reorganizing the circuits of accumulation by shifting the focus from production to asset valorization and the extraction of territorialized rents (Cotula 2012; Isakson 2014; Clapp and Isakson 2018). This text contributes to the debate by examining how land is increasingly treated as a financial asset through the articulation of rentier and speculative logics, suggesting that asset managers play a pivotal role as strategic intermediaries who coordinate investment flows, mediate relationships between financial investors and local actors, and embed financial rationalities into the operational logic of farming enterprises (Clapp and Isakson 2018).

Although often grouped under the label of ‘financial capital’, institutional investors differ considerably in their profiles, time horizons and modes of territorialization (Knuth 2015; Ouma 2020). Among them, asset management firms have emerged as key protagonists in the financialization of the global economy (Christophers 2023). Acting as intermediaries, managing pooled resources from pension funds, insurance companies, endowments and high-net-worth individuals, they allocate capital across asset classes to maximize returns, shaping global investment flows and corporate strategies in the agrifood sector.

These dynamics operate through complex trans-scalar arrangements that obscure ownership structures and hinder legal accountability. The ‘architecture of invisibility’ shields asset managers from the social and environmental consequences of their investments, impeding the identification of both investors and land assets. At the same time, such arrangements reveal that financialization is neither de-territorialized nor purely abstract, but materializes through specific actors, institutions and territorial configurations. To address these transformations, this intervention analyzes (1) the conversion of land into a financial asset and its implications for property relations; (2) the role of asset managers in the trans-scalar governance of farmland, coordinating capital flows and shaping land markets through financial rationalities; and (3) the architecture of invisibility and trans-scalar arrangements that conceal ownership patterns while facilitating the incorporation of peripheral territories into global circuits of capital accumulation.

Almost 15 years have passed since Tania Li's seminal paper, ‘Situating Labour in the Land Grab Debate’ (Li 2011), was published. With over 1,200 citations on Google Scholar, one might expect us to have arrived at a profound understanding of the impact of the global land grab on labour regimes and capital–agricultural labour relations across diverse geographies.

From a broader perspective, the answer to that expectation is ‘yes’. Indeed, a growing body of literature has examined how large-scale investments in agriculture reshape the spheres of production, reproduction and agricultural labour markets at large. This often includes contract-farming arrangements, where these spheres are closely intertwined, as household labour is frequently mobilized—often in cheapened or unpaid forms—to subsidize contract-based agricultural production.

However, once we centre finance in a more substantial way by looking into financialized farmland or agricultural operations—something Li did not do in her seminal paper—‘labour’ still remains a lacunae. Major empirical works on capital placements in agriculture,⁴ such as Fairbairn (2020), Dixon (2023), Langford (2023) and my own (Ouma 2020), say very little about labour, class relations and labour struggles (for a constructive critique of this, see also Sturman 2024). Cochet's (2018) work on the labour-value nexus in large-scale farming is one of the few major contributions on the topic, yet it has received only 27 citations since its publication. Assuming that large-scale agriculture is defined by a separation of capital and labour, unlike the ‘family farm’, the Cochet's paper focuses on different types of large-scale farming in Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ukraine and South Africa, in order to ‘study the way value added is distributed in order to compare the shares going to labour compensation, capital (investors and financial institutions …) and other actors (rental payments for land, taxes or duties paid to the state)’ (ibid.: 18). Although it is not solely focused on cases where agricultural investment funds drive the expansion of large-scale farming, it is still a useful piece due to its ambition to quantify how value is distributed between capital and labour.

At the same time, empirical and research-related developments have further complicated the labour question, requiring us to acknowledge the multiple ways to think through the finance-land-labour nexus. In this intervention, I will argue that the financialization of farmland and agricultural production can be connected to labour issues in at least six promising ways. During this, I will stick to my own line of research: the placement of equity capital in production. That said, finance's penetration of agriculture also includes the classic vehicle of ‘credit’ (Green 1987; Le Heron 1991; Green 2022) as well as other stages of the agricultural value chain (Clapp and Isakson 2018; Burch and Lawrence 2013).

The first approach discussed here follows on from Li's (2011) original work. This approach directs our attention towards the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion arising from the large-scale placement of capital in agriculture. What labour relations and practices are established on assetized farms? What racialized, gendered and classed legacies do these rely on? How do these arrangements differ from those on farms run as plantations or large-family farms with a long-term farming intention, where rentierism and speculation play less of a role? How do such placements shape labour markets over longer periods of time? In my own research, I demonstrated that investors targeting farms in Aotearoa New Zealand did not need to develop new methods of labour exploitation. Instead, they could build upon three decades of market liberalisation and ‘farm professionalization’, which resulted in the development of a flexible labour market system (Stringer 2016). This system often relied on South/Southeast Asian or Pacific Islander workers, who were hired through labour market intermediaries, as seen in the dairy industry. Alternatively, farms could utilize external contractors, or ‘teams for hire’, for specific services, as observed in the fruit industry.

However, what farm managers and investors pressured by the drive for shareholder value do is think more deeply about labour incentivization and monitoring. This results in a practice that I call ‘dashboard farming’ (Ouma 2020, 141). For instance, the Map of Agriculture project⁵ emerged from the desire of a New Zealand agri-focused asset manager to create a ‘Bloomberg for agriculture’ so that both the scouting for farms and their management become better aligned with the data-centred work of institutional investors and asset managers.

This insight comes with two caveats. First, given the wide variety of investment geographies, these findings cannot easily be generalized, and we must always consider the finance capital-labour nexus within its specific historical and geographical context. Secondly, critics might argue that finance underpins all investments in agriculture, whether they are classified as ordinary, so-called strategic agribusiness investments (e.g., Del Monte opening a new pineapple farm), or as instances of assetization, where new players target agriculture solely for the purpose of asset creation. From this perspective, the emerging literature on large-scale land grabs addressing labour issues might be considered a step in the right direction. Indeed, there are cases where both logics cannot be easily separated (Cochet 2018). However, we need to operate more carefully and adopt a distinction between the logic of investment—which might shape classical agribusiness decisions—and that of capital placements (see endnote 4), where financiers acquire an asset with the explicit intention of speculation and rent-seeking over a relatively short period of time. We need more research that accounts for this distinct logic and thus examines in detail the impact of a focus on financial objectives, metrics and narratives on on-farm labour relations and labour markets, and the mechanisms through which this occurs. At the same time, we need to consider the exclusionary dynamics induced by large-scale capital placements in farmland in particular. What happens to farmers (as well as fisher folk, hunters, beekeepers, nut collectors and pastoralists, for example) who have been dispossessed and displaced by such placements? What happens to the domain of reproductive labour, as is brilliantly illustrated in great empirical detail in Chung's work on Tanzania (Chung 2024)? Although we have seen a lot of good work published in this field in recent years, this work has usually not built a more solid bridge between inclusion–exclusion dynamics and the fundamental logics of capital markets.

A second way of thinking about the relationship between finance, land and labour is to prioritize social reproduction, which, as of more recently, has become a more central concern in the land grab debate and critical agrarian studies at large (Chung 2017; Ossome 2022; Shattuck et al. 2023; Wolford 2021; see also the contribution of Alessandra Mezzadri to this first instalment of this forum). However, it needs to be more explicitly tied to the question of how financialization/assetization dynamics reshape the land–social reproduction nexus. Social reproduction becomes relevant in relation to female farm (or factory) workers, raising the question of how corporate financialization logics shape their lived experiences at the intersection of wage and the household sphere. However, it could also be extended to include the female spouses and children of farmers who are recruited as cheap labour in contract farming, as demonstrated in our own research (Iddrisu et al. 2002), building upon an established tradition that goes back to the heydays of the modes of production debate (Carney 1988). Lastly, finance and social reproduction might be connected via the issue of ‘credit’ rather than equity. This is superbly demonstrated by Green and Bylander (2021) in their work on microfinance, household indebtedness and distress land sales in Laos. Like the realm of production itself, both aspects might be sites of resistance, and the ‘counter-topographies’ (Del Rio 2024) emanating from this hold valuable lessons for imagining alternative production and financing methods.

Some readers of this journal may find the third approach challenging, as it replaces the traditional Marxist category of ‘labour’ with ‘work’. Of course, many Marxists are not opposed to broadening the category of ‘labour’ per se, as evidenced by more recent work on labour as social reproduction or different classes of labour, as shown in this journal (Barbesgaard 2025). However, what might raise a few eyebrows is moving away from the exploited classes—the rural working people, broadly speaking—to encompass all the other players involved in turning agriculture into a financial asset, such as fund managers, placement agents, lawyers, valuers, enterprising family farmers and (internationally mobile) farm managers (Langford 2023). Examining how these ‘agents of capital’ assemble an agricultural asset through embodied work builds on a praxeological tradition (Boussard 2017) that appears to conflict with Marxist concerns (Fine 2003; Preda 2013). However, adopting the perspective of the ‘micro-founded political economy of the investment chain’ (Braun 2016, 6), which links the concrete actions of sense-making subjects to more abstract ‘operations of capital’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2015; Ouma 2016), allows us to salvage the best of both worlds. Andrew Ofstehage's (2025) recent book, which focuses on how migrant farmers from the US contribute to the creation of ‘soylandia’ in Brazil, is a great example of this.

A fourth way to multiply ‘labour’ within the finance-agriculture context is to introduce non-human labour, taking cues from critical animal and multispecies studies. Financiers, or at least the farm managers they employ, often make conscious decisions about which animal breeds or crops to introduce and how to maximize their output. In my own research into assetized farms in Tanzania and Aotearoa New Zealand, I have observed the impact of factors such as different poultry or dairy breeds or the type of clover planted on the rate at which investment capital is recouped. The concept of non-human labour could also be extended to include the work of microorganisms, which further challenges classic Marxist thinking on labour. This could explain why the seminal book on the subject by Besky and Blanchette (2019) has not yet been cited in any contributions to the ‘land grab literature’ (according to Google Scholar). Similarly, Wolford et al.'s (2024) recent stock-taking article cites an impressive 304 papers but does not mention the words ‘animal’ or ‘non-human labour’ once! While there are limits to how much ‘labour’ we can attribute to animals and other non-human organisms (Marxist Education Project 2024), it would be beneficial to further explore this connection, particularly in light of rapid technological advances that facilitate the manipulation and control of organisms of various sizes, incorporating them into capitalist systems in increasingly profound ways (Guthman and Fairbairn 2024). As we see the further expansion of venture-capital powered platforms and other ‘AG-tech solutions’ (Reisman et al. 2025), this also bears the question of how new forms of precision-farming reshape the labouring capacity of animals, microorganisms and nature at large.

The fifth way to focus on labour in the context of our debate relates to the long-standing interest of those working on the agrarian question. Might capitalist technological progress render certain forms of labour obsolete? Examples of this include the replacement of manual tasks such as milking and cleaning stalls by robots and the replacement of the cognitive work of farm managers and workers by data-collecting tractors and drones. In certain parts of the world, digital technologies and processes of automation are beginning to reshape the domain of agricultural production and its pre- and post-stages to such extents that the classic Mann–Dickinson thesis, which claimed that agriculture cannot be fully subsumed to capitalist logics because of its metabolism and dependence on family labour, needs to be revisited (Mann and Dickinson 1978). When adopting a financialization and assetization optic, new empirical avenues emerge. Financiers tend to prefer lean corporate structures. Reducing capital-intensive costs can improve the appearance of assets on the balance sheet. Similarly, cutting back on human labour, which requires wages and benefits such as health insurance and pension payments and may organize collectively, can also enhance an asset's value. Digital technologies can aid these processes. For example, capital cost expenditure can be closely monitored through dashboards, and production processes can be automated (Rotz et al. 2019).

Lastly, we can problematize labour itself as a source of capital that ultimately finds its way into agriculture. This brings us to Mr and Mrs Scheper, two retired German doctors whom I mention in the epilogue of my book. In 2018, they discovered that their retirement provider, the medical chamber of a German state, had invested in a TIAA-CREF fund in Brazil. In the United States, the institution now simply known as TIAA serves teachers, professors and other professionals as a retirement providers. The said fund had been accused of gross social and environmental misconduct (Schwab 2018). As I wrote, ‘Having supported indigenous struggles in Brazil for decades and having personal experience in the field, the Schepers were particularly shocked at what had seemingly happened to their retirement savings’ (Ouma 2020, 181). The Schepers' experience highlights an uncomfortable question: Where does all the interest-bearing capital flowing into agriculture come from? While the very rich and ultra-wealthy certainly have a stake in this (Bill Gates is currently the largest private farmland owner in the United States!), a significant proportion of this originates from pension funds centred on the working and middle classes. By 2023, an astonishing 960 active funds had specialized in food and agricultural assets (Seufert et al. 2025, 15), managing over US$150 billion in future pensions for workers in countries with capital market-based retirement systems. While the Schepers are not workers in the strict sense of the word, they are still representative of what I have termed the ‘global return society’—a global socio-material formation in which the reproduction of the better-off people of the Global North (and increasingly the Global South) is tied to the reproduction of finance capital, both ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ (Ouma 2020, 135; see also Parfitt 2018, for an insightful article). The role of pension funds in the financialization/assetization of agriculture and the underlying politics of reproducing imperial lifestyles of a certain class of labour within transnational ‘value relations’ (Araghi 2003) has received little attention from scholars.

I hope scholars of critical agrarian studies find these reflections useful, and the finance-land-labour nexus will move to the centre of debates for the years to come. Placing labour at the finance-land nexus is not a straightforward affair, as there are multiple entry points for framing the ‘labour question’ in this context.

Acknowledgements

I thank Carla Gras, Youjin Chung and Sara Hayyat for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

The finance, land and labour nexus continues to form new assemblages and shift over time. To this mix, we must increasingly add digital technologies as a key element of transformation. Digital agriculture is rapidly changing the ways in which farmland is acquired, managed and turned into a financial asset. These tools are used to make land, labour and production more legible and more visible to a range of agrifood actors, leading to new forms of governance. In this contribution, I examine the growing interconnections between the assetization of land and digital technologies (and their associated data). In turn, I relate these evolving trends to the question of labour, asking: How does the use of new digital tools in assetized and non-assetized contexts affect the nature of agricultural labour?

In considering how to conceptualize the critical role of technology in new forms of accumulation and the changing dynamics of financialization, I examine the coupling of platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism in agriculture. As we continue to theorize about the power of digital technologies to restructure production, ownership and related material relations, there is a need to apply these concepts to the agrarian questions of land and labour. Studies have demonstrated the ways in which these technologies and their associated data are reinforcing corporate power and reshaping agricultural knowledge production, but little work to date has been done to extend the analysis to the assetization of land and changes in labour regimes. I suggest that emerging forms of agrarian platform and surveillance capitalism—with attention to global forces, such as climate change, and regional differences—are key to understanding contemporary processes of agrarian change.

The contributions to this Forum provide valuable insight for centering finance within agrarian change. They do this by offering grounds to analyse four interrelated processes: (1) the distinct logic of the assetization of farmland and agricultural operations; (2) the variety of property structures to control land and other elements of agricultural production; (3) the mutually reinforcing ties between assetization, digital technologies and the development of new sites for financial investment in the agricultural sector (i.e., the creation of monetized exchanges involving data and expert knowledge, giving place for new types of service-provision); and (4) the impacts on the demand for labour and labour relations driven by shareholder value. To connect the above contributions with a broader analysis of agrarian change, I synthesize these collective insights with Bernstein's key questions of agrarian political economy (see Bernstein 2010).