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

Abstract

The issue of large-scale financial investment in agriculture is of increasing concern. Land grabbing —the acquisition of large tracts of agricultural land in the Global South, often at the expense of dispossessed small farmers—and the almost ubiquitous rise of corporate farming—at the expense of family farms—are two supposed aspects of the way increasing global financial investment in agriculture are transforming rural geographies throughout the world. This is seen to be accompanied by rising foreign ownership of agricultural land and enterprises, and greater intensification of agriculture with consequent harmful environmental effects. This book by Stefan Ouma tackles the broad topic of the role of global finance in agriculture and does so in novel ways by seeking to follow the money and dig deep into the world of pension funds, equity investment, and assetization in agriculture. This is a welcome, important, and innova-tive approach that does much to extend our understandings of increasingly complex rural worlds. The book, at text, is for and one if navigate the ESG, GPs/LPs, HNWIs, MPMT. As a to understand how global finance is reshaping agriculture, excellent and accessible it moves beyond mere introduction to explore some complex themes raise some vital questions for future research. Its chapter structure reflects this objective. Successive chapters address optics (how we conceptualize the finance-farming nexus), history; data; the role of states, values and ethics; the complexity of the investment chains; the view from the farm gate; and food-finance futures. Throughout, the discussions draw on the author's engagement with the world of finance (attending investment seminars, reading investment data, interviews with fund managers etc.), and two detailed con-trasting case studies in Tanzania and Aotearoa New Zealand. These two places reveal quite different contexts for investment in agriculture in terms of history, environments, politics, social structures, and impacts. Yet