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?