What are the ties in between farming and finance?
An inquiry into the finance-driven land rush and the future of food and agriculture.
An inquiry into the finance-driven land rush and the future of food and agriculture.
This website includes many findings from eight years of global research culminating in my book “Farming as Financial Asset – Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes”. It also contains additional research by me and other (invited) researchers concerned with the transformation of farmland, agricultural production and other parts of the agricultural value chain into financial assets. The website seeks to speak to a broad audience and aims at demystifying the operations of global asset management, activities that often appear as complex, opaque and technical. If you come across unfamiliar terms and concept, click on Glossary in the footer menu. Or scroll through the key literature advice in the footer menu of this homepage. If you have further questions, feel free to contact me.
The common thread running through this website is the notion of institutional landscapes. It refers to those parts of the human and non-human world that have become transformed into a financial asset, a property that yields an income stream and that can be resold in the future, as part of portfolio considerations of institutional investors. These, in turn, serve the needs of the more privileged ones in society. In other words, institutional landscapes are an expression of the expansion of a “global return society”, in which the reproduction of the better-off people of the Global North (and, increasingly, the Global South) has become tied to the reproduction of finance capital, both “at home” and abroad. Often the roots of this capital lead right back into the “middle of society”.
Photograph. Source: Sigmund on Unsplash.
The pedagogical strategy behind this platform is the ambition to ground the operations of global finance in concrete places, sites and activities, and to unpack the often-far-flung relations through which institutional landscapes come into being.
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Photograph. Source: iStock
This website offers space to fellow researchers, who discuss emerging perspectives on the making and unmaking of (agrarian) institutional landscapes worldwide. If you are interested in contributing, please contact me directly.
To the contributions06 March 2022
Partly building on his work in Tanzania, Gideon Tups helps us make sense of the keyword “patient capital”, which has become a buzzword in development finance.
18 February 2023
Sorting out Ownership Questions: Sociologists Loka Ashwood and Phil Howard engage with the problem of tracing ownership relations along the agri-investment chain.
21 January 2023
Anthropologist Tijo Salverda revisits his long-term ethnography of an agri-investment in Zambia, centering temporality as a key prism.
12 December 2022
Samuel Frederico opens our Guest Writer Series with a post on ‘following the money’ in the case of Brazilian agri-investments.
21 November 2022
We are happy to announce that several colleagues from around the world have agreed to contribute to our guest writers’ sections.
22 August 2022
We are online: Agri-investment scholars of the world unite!
All Guest Contributions
