Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing

and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus
Stefan Ouma
Economic Geography Research Group, Department of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6, PEG-Gebaeude, 60629
Frankfurt, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into
Received 21 May 2015 financial markets. Building on the notion of ‘‘operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for
Received in revised form 28 January 2016 scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two
Accepted 1 February 2016
useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of
Available online xxxx
the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture
and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible
Keywords:
when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism
Farmland
Agriculture
as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sen-
Global finance sitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked
Financialization economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures.
Social studies of finance Second, it allows us to move beyond simply treating ‘‘financialization” as explanans. Shifting attention
History to the situated practical activities of global finance, it eventually helps us explore central categories of
Global land rush financial economization (‘‘capital”, ‘‘resources”, ‘‘property” and ‘‘value”) as practical accomplishments
rather than taking them for granted. Only then can we come to terms with how finance works through
farmland in different geographical settings. Empirical material from an ongoing research project will sup-
port my arguments.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
‘‘Financialization” has become a key term in the critical social
sciences. Often used to describe a historical condition that is
marked by the ‘‘growing and systemic power of finance and finan-
cial engineering” (Blackburn, 2006, p. 40), observers have found
that almost everything has been financialized: economies, firms,
sectors, nature, households, daily life. While scholars working with
the concept have often contributed to enhancing our understand-
ing of the rise of global finance and its implications for the ‘‘real
economy”, the reiteration of the concept across the social sciences
has not been unproblematic (Christophers, 2015). Frequently, ‘‘fin
ancialization” has been turned into an abstract force sui generis,
morphing from explanandum into explanans. In this regard, it
has shared the fate of other concepts such as ‘‘capitalism”, ‘‘the
market”, ‘‘globalization” or ‘‘neoliberalism” (Ouma, 2015a).
E-mail address: ouma@geo.uni-frankfurt.de
More recently, several authors have used the concept to make
sense of finance’s growing appetite for all things agricultural (for
critical reviews, see Ouma, 2014, 2015b). While attuning us to a
number of important questions, the project of applying a financial-
ization perspective to the incorporation of farmland and food pro-
duction into financial circuits of value encounters a number of
analytical and epistemological challenges. First, much of the liter-
ature, as the financialization literature more generally, deploys ‘a
restricted historical optic, (...) thus overlooking historic parallels
and (dis)continuities’ (Christophers, 2015, p. 192). After all, finance
has a long history of penetrating agriculture (Chayanov, 1966;
Cronon, 1992). Second, given that the concept has been used to
make sense of dynamics in core regions of global financialized cap-
italism (e.g., Krippner, 2005; Lapavitsas, 2011), the next challenge
seems to be ‘to produce rich, contextualized research on what pro-
cesses of financialisation mean in broader regional contexts,
beyond the usual financial industries, occupations and places’
(Lee et al., 2009, p. 736). What happens if we start researching
the new finance–farmland-nexus in Zambia, Tanzania, Australia,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
0016-7185/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
2 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
or New Zealand? Might accounts from ‘‘the margins”1 requalify
existing understandings of ‘‘financialization”? Finally, the existing
literature is unsure whether it wants to use the concept of ‘‘financi
alization” as a prism to theorize accumulation dynamics in contem-
porary capitalism, or whether it wants to say something about how
finance works. Much of the finance-oriented works on the global
land rush does in fact rely on literature that does the former. Of
course, the question is whether a literature which does not have
the ambition to explain how finance works can fully grasp how
the incorporation of farmland and agriculture into financial markets
practically unfolds.
This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking
through the incorporation of farmland into ‘‘financial markets”.
Building on the notion of operations of capital (Mezzadra and
Neilson, 2013, 2015), a concept that has the power to bridge con-
cerns of critical political economy with those of the practice-
attuned field of the social studies of finance, it sketches analytical
entry points for further scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-
finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make
two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps
provide a more nuanced historicization of the coupling of finance
and farmland. Early work on the global land rush at times created
the impression that the ‘‘financialization of farmland” is a child of
neoliberal capitalism (McMichael, 2012; White et al., 2012). More
recently, several authors have tried to transcend this rather narrow
historical take on finance’s entanglement with farming (e.g.,
Fairbairn, 2014, 2015b; Gunnoe, 2014; Martin and Clapp, 2015).
This paper sympathizes with such undertakings. But rather than
mobilizing the historically blurry catch-all concept of ‘‘financializ
ation”, it advances the notion of operations of capital. The latter
attunes us to the situated modes, processes and practices of finan-
cial economization that have reworked organizations, economic
relations, labor and nature at specific historical conjunctures. His-
toricizing the finance–farmland-nexus gets complicated by the fact
that there is not one history of capitalist transition, but that there
are multiple histories (Taylor, 2010). The ‘‘financialization of farm-
land” may mean different things in different agrarian contexts.
The second contribution of the concept lies in its power to over-
come one of the main lacunae of the existing literature, which,
despite greater historical sensitivity as of more recently, still treats
‘‘financialization” as an external force. Thus, this paper reaffirms
Visser et al.’s (2015, p. 541) call to ‘examine real-life incarnations
of finance in the sector by looking at investment arrangements,
including connections with the state, and its (regional) variations’
(see also Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2016; Williams, 2014). It further
substantiates this concern, as it urges scholars to investigate the
historically and geographically variegated grounded operations of
finance. An operations perspective eventually shifts the focus from
an ostensive notion of ‘‘financialization” (i.e. financialization as
preconfigured explanans) to a performative one, treating it as a
practical accomplishment.2 The operative dimension of farmland
investment relations can only be effectively rematerialized if we
break down the categories of capital, resources, property and value
1
By account from ‘‘the margins”, I do not simply mean an account of capitalist
accumulation dynamics produced in a so-called ‘‘periphery” (Shivji, 2009). I rather
mean an account that aims at decentering histories of capitalism written in epistemic
centers such as North America or Europe in relation to ‘‘other spaces” (Taylor, 2010).
From such a perspective, even settler-colonial countries such as New Zealand or
Australia would count as ‘‘margins” because they have neither been featured strongly
in the prominent literature on financialization nor in the literature on its agrarian
variant (for exceptions, see Le Heron, 2013; Magnan, 2015; Sippel et al., 2015).
2
The inspiration here is Latour’s call for a shift from an ostensive to a performative
take on social relations and society at large. We cannot leave the definition of
‘‘society” (or ‘‘economy”) to social scientists and their preconfigured categories. We
need to focus on how it is performed through everyday practices of definition,
legitimation, enactment etc. among social actors themselves (Latour, 1986: 273).
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
into practical activities – ‘‘things” that are often taken for granted
in the existing literature. As will eventually become clear, unpacking
these activities is a political act, because it ‘‘un-black-boxes”
‘devices, practices, or organizations that are opaque to outsiders,
often because their contents are regarded as ‘‘technical”’
(MacKenzie, 2005, p. 555).
Overall, this paper’s ambition is less to develop a new compre-
hensive framework for analyzing ‘‘finance-gone-farming”, but to
sketch different entry points for further exploring the geographi-
cally variegated operations of agri-finance capital formation. Even
though the paper’s nature is programmatic, I shall use empirical
material for illustrative purposes.
This paper is structured as follows: In the next section, I prob-
lematize some of the shortcomings of concept of ‘‘financialization”,
detailing how it has been put to use to study ‘‘finance-gone-farm
ing”. I will then propose an alternative analytics before historiciz-
ing the finance–farmland-nexus more nuancedly than done in the
existing literature. The latter part of the paper will disentangle the
finance–farmland nexus and scrutinize the notions of capital,
resources, property and value through the prism of the concept
of operations. Arguments made in each section will be illustrated
with empirical material from an ongoing research project on the
variegated financial economization of farmland and its local entan-
glements. ‘Follow[ing] the money’ (Christophers, 2011), the project
builds on interviews with farm managers and/or asset managers in
Tanzania, Australia and New Zealand.3 While Tanzania, like much of
Africa, counts as a risky ‘‘niche market” for only ‘the hardiest of
investors’ (White, 2014), Australia and New Zealand are considered
prime frontiers in financial circles, especially for large (but risk-
averse) institutional investors. Each of these countries offers differ-
ent crop choices, investment and property regimes, agroecological
conditions, infrastructural bases, local socioeconomic particularities,
and market conditions. Such historically produced and geographi-
cally variegated conditions affect the making of capital, resources,
property, and value for ‘‘financial markets” in crucial but differenti-
ated ways.
2. Farmland investments as ‘‘financialization
It is now common sense in the critical social sciences that we
live in financialized times. Since the crisis of industrial capitalism
in the 1970s, finance has been steadily expanding its operations
into ever-new domains, which subsequently led to the incorpora-
tion of currencies, manufacturing, real estate, infrastructure,
households, commodities and even the weather into financial cir-
cuits of value. Therefore, it was not surprising that finance recently
turned its eye to farmland and food production, at least this is the
narrative we frequently encounter in much of the current litera-
ture that deals with the finance-driven version of the global land
rush (Ouma, 2014). It sounds convincing, as finance’s growing
interest in all things agricultural seems to be a text-book case of
Harvey’s idea of the spatiotemporal fix (Castree, 2009; Harvey,
1982): after crises and devaluations in established domains of
finance, capital sought greener pastures, extending its operational
space into geographies in which it was previously not much inter-
ested in. ‘‘Finance” itself has not fallen short of spectacularising its
new interest in ‘‘real things”. Industry players claim that even
though agriculture was the oldest asset class in world, investors
had grossly neglected it. While this claim obscures the long-
lasting entanglements between finance and agriculture, e.g. in
the domain of commodity futures, it serves well to make an
3
Additionally, it draws on interviews with key industry players placed in Germany,
the US and South Africa, observations made at different agri-investment conferences,
and the analysis of media and investor accounts of farmland investments. The project
started in 2013.
 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
investment case for farmland and agriculture. Indeed, since
2007/08 farmland/agriculture is framed as a thing you should bet
on. According to legendary investor Jim Rogers, ‘farmers are going
to be driving the Lamborghinis; stock brokers are going to be driv-
ing tractors’ (quoted in Harding, 2012). With farmland/agriculture,
one can be sure for the next decades that there will be effective
demand – ‘no matter how bad things get, we all have to eat’ (The
Economist, 2009).4
Harvey’s oevre, together with a few other political economists
such as Arrighi (1994) or Krippner (2005), often serves as a key ref-
erence when scholars make sense of the finance-driven version of
the global land rush and requalify it as the ‘‘financialization (of
food) and farmland”. For instance, drawing on Harvey (2010),
Isakson (2014: 765) notes: ‘Given that much – though certainly
not all [...] – of the acquired land is located in foreign markets,
these land acquisitions can be likened to a ‘‘spatial fix”, wherein
financial actors seek accumulation opportunities abroad when
domestic markets are no longer capable of delivering’ (see also
McMichael, 2012).
Such a reading is attractive, because it opens the debate on
finance’s penetration of agriculture to broader questions about
the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism, including its boom
and bust cycles. Yet even though such ‘‘macro language” is good
for starting debates about epochal shifts in the global economy
and their underlying dynamics, it often fails to provide us with
an understanding of how the economies of finance are assembled
and worked upon in practice. It is against this backdrop that I
recently argued practice-attuned approaches in anthropology,
sociology, and the interdisciplinary field of the social studies of
finance can help provide novel insights into the grounded work-
ings of ‘‘finance-gone-farming” (Ouma, 2014, 2015b; see also
Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2016; Williams, 2014).
But existing accounts employing a ‘‘financialization analytics”
to make sense of the enrollment of farmland into financial circuits
of value encounter at least three other (more generic) problems.
First, most of them use ‘‘financialization” as a concept to theorize
the changing nature of capitalist accumulation rather than to
unpack finance’s inner workings as such. Second, despite the fact
that the idea of the spatiotemporal fix stands for a geographical
historical-materialist analytical orientation (Castree, 2009), it was
only more recently that scholars started to explicitly acknowledge
the importance of a long-term historical-geographical perspective
(Fairbairn, 2014, 2015a; Gunnoe, 2014; Martin and Clapp, 2015;
Sommerville and Magnan, 2015). Third, available readings largely
operate with a foundational vocabulary that takes for granted the
objects it describes. In other words, existing works consider
money, capital and the farmland underpinning the latter to ‘be
unproblematic material resources’ (de Goede, 2005, p. 6). However,
like money capital, resources, property and value – central ‘‘things”
in ‘‘financialization of farmland” – ‘are not unmediated economic
realities that can be taken as a starting point for academic inquiry’
(de Goede, 2005), but arise from contested practices of financial
economization.5 Unpacking the practical activities of finance
in situ has been the prime goal of an interdisciplinary field popular-
ized as the social studies of finance (see, e.g. Langley, 2008;
MacKenzie, 2005; Preda, 2013; Pryke and Du Gay, 2007). Insights
from this field can breathe fresh air into the study of ‘‘finance-gon
4
As outlined elsewhere (McMichael, 2012; Fairbairn, 2014; author, 2014), there
are several other reasons why farmland (and agriculture more generally) is currently
being promoted as an ‘‘alternative asset class”. Among others, this includes farmland’s
simple and tangible character, as well as its attested portfolio-diversifying charac-
teristics and negative correlation with the value of other mainstream assets; ability to
store and produce value; and robustness against inflation.
5
The term ‘‘financial economization” as used here is inspired by the social studies
of economization and marketization literature (Çalısßkan and Callon, 2009, 2010).
Practices of financial economization lie at the core of finance’s operations.
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
3
e-farming”.6 Even though not explicitly rooted in that intellectual
tradition, Martin et al. (2008, p 128) capture the gist of such a pro-
gramme quite well: ‘(r)eckoning finance into a practical activity dis-
closes capital’s own methods such that they might be both
reappropriated and redeployed (...)’ – ‘it is an effort to specify what
capital’s movement does, both to itself and across a whole range of
social sites and activities’ (Martin et al., 2008: 210).
3. Farmland investments as operations of capital
Embracing more practice-attuned approaches to study the mul-
tiple activities of global finance, however, risks denying ‘analytical
validity to the category of capital’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013,
p. 10) and capitalism more generally (Leyshon and Thrift, 2007;
Preda, 2013). In this regard, the social studies of finance have
attracted the same sort of criticism as its related field, the social
studies of economization and marketization (see, e.g., Fine, 2003;
Christophers, 2014; Ouma, 2015a). A useful bridging concept in
this regard is that of ‘‘operations of capital” recently developed
by Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, 2015). Speaking from a political
economy perspective that had fruitful encounters with poststruc-
turalism and the new materialism (Tsing, 2012), it helps develop
a grounded understanding of historio-geographically variegated
financial economization processes7:
‘Using the concept of operations of capital [...] opens a new
angle for the critical analysis of the relation between capital
and capitalism. An operation always refers to specific capitalist
actors while also being embedded in a wider network of opera-
tions and relations that involve other actors, processes, and
structures. This gives us two analytical avenues through which
to examine the work done by an operation. The first, with its
reference to specific capitalist actors, reveals the workings of
capital in particular material configurations, shedding light on
processes of valorization as well as on the frictions and tensions
crisscrossing them in lived and grounded circumstances. The
second focuses on the articulation of operations into larger
and changing formations that comprise capitalism as a whole’
(Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015: 6–7).
Thus, an operations of capital analytics does not solely focus on
the everyday practices of finance – finance as work. Operations are
quotidian and abstract at once, as they speak to shared legal stan-
dards, conventions, heuristics and rationalities of the global
finance industry. These are recursively enacted in the everyday
practices of financial economization, invoking a ‘relation between
moment and totality’ (Giddens, 1979, p. 79).
For instance, the remaking of farmland/agriculture into an alter-
native asset class is embedded into the larger socio-legal and -
technical architecture of the world of money management, which
is led by institutional investors such as pension funds and insur-
ance companies. These act as trustees for the original asset owners
and usually delegate their funds to specialized asset managers
(Clark and Monk, 2014), which in turn would invest these funds
into farmland operations, either through a lease-operate, own-
operate or own-lease structure (Daniel, 2012; Fairbairn, 2014).
The investment relationships underpinning these deals are heavily
contractualized and they contain as much public regulation (e.g.,
6
This is not to say that all large-scale land acquisitions happening over the past
decade or so have been driven by genuinely financial investors. Strategic acquisitions
by agrobusiness enterprises or states have also been key drivers of the global land
rush. These acquisitions are not subject of this paper.
7
What should be added in this regard is that the concept of operations does not
necessarily call for an ethnographic approach to cash in its epistemological ambitions.
Rather, it stands for a way of ‘undertaking problematizations’ (Roy, 2012, p. 34) of the
world of finance.
4 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
with regard to investor protection; information sharing; division of
labor) (Ortiz, 2014) as they contain financial theory (MacKenzie,
2005).
When it comes to farmland investments, both large investors
(such as pension funds) and asset managers usually relate to the
same models, which have been formalized since at least the
1980s. For instance, much of the arguments for farmland as an
investment opportunity invoke the basics of modern portfolio
management theory (MPMT), which stipulates that ‘diversification
increases expected portfolio returns while reducing volatility’
(Cumming et al., 2013, p. 21) – add farmland to your portfolio,
and you will have a more robust one (Chen et al., 2014)! While
MPMT is usually associated with quantitative techniques of portfo-
lio management and construction (Langley, 2008; Vormbusch,
2012), farmland investments have not yet been subjected to highly
sophisticated mathematical modelling due to the limited calcula-
tive commensurability of farmland with other asset classes.8 Nev-
ertheless, the associated models still exert an influence on the
performative constitution of an ‘‘asset class in-the-making”. Thus,
contemporary practices of financial economization rest upon a
‘finance-specific order of knowledge’ (Vormbusch, 2012, p. 314) that
regulates the placement of capital into established and new
domains. As one investment consultant interviewed said, ‘it does
not matter how an asset class is being called, but that it can be rep-
resented according to financial criteria’ (interview, 2014).
Institutional investors and delegated asset managers constantly
have to weigh the future worth of existing investments vis-à-vis
the potential future worth of alternative investments (Ducastel
and Anseeuw, 2016: 4). Subjected to both the dictates of financial
theory and a fiduciary imperative, they will only go for an ‘‘asset
(class)” if it has a justifiable financial worth (Orléan, 2014). This
does not simply mean that an object generates sufficient returns
on capital, but that it generates relatively superior, risk-adjusted
returns. There is no final worth in the world of finance, only asset
classes competing with each other. These structural imperatives
make fund managers ‘face the constant challenge of maximizing
returns on their investment portfolios, subject to risk and liquidity
constraints’ (Lins et al., 1992, p. 449), which puts pressure on
investments further downstream in the ‘‘financial value chain”.
An empirical snapshot may illustrate this. When visiting a
finance-backed grain farm in northern Tanzania in 2013, I met
the farm manager, who also would act as the local representative
of the Asia-based financial intermediary who managed the ‘‘asset”
on behalf of a European institutional investor. During the inter-
view, in a moment of reflection upon his daily routines on a farm
that was now part of a financial portfolio, he emphasized that
much of his job was about accountability – producing numbers
for investors. He would carry his phone with him twelve hours a
day, so that he could always be reached by the asset manager
entrusted with the project. There was a satellite interlink on the
farm so that information could get out very quickly. The manager
underlined that ten years ago, this would not have been possible
due to technology gaps in this part of the world. Such connections,
however, were necessary to meet the strict reporting standards of
large institutional investors, who themselves were subjected to a
fiduciary imperative. Regularly, huge amounts of information had
to be reported and he spent several hours every day administering
excel spreadsheets, rather than working on the farm itself.
8 9
This is for a variety of reasons: First, there is a lack of historical data for many
regions of the world that would allow to compare the performance of specific
farmland investments with the performance of other assets. Second, while the value
of other assets (such as stocks) can be assessed on a daily basis, this is much more
difficult with farmland (‘there is no ticker for farmland’, see Sherrick et al., 2013).
Third, many farmland investments are conducted on case-to-case basis rather than
through sophisticated portfolio structures.
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
According to the interviewee, the mandate that had been given
to him was to ‘realize the optimum potential’ (interview, 2013).
What struck me, besides this being a great example of the
‘wormhole form’ of globalized capitalism (Sheppard, 2002,
p. 323),9 was to see that the whole 4000 ha property was fenced
by a New Zealand type livestock fence, which was guarded by a
patrol car 24/7. The fence was meant to keep out local pastoralists,
who would frequently send in their cows after fields had been har-
vested, which, however interfered with the zero tillage10 cultivation
methods the farm management employed. While the farm manager
was quick to point out that ‘this is a livestock and not a security
fence’ (interview, 2013), it was, nevertheless, part of a larger security
apparatus that was meant to tame risk by annihilating contingency.
The fence, together with the frequent reporting required by inves-
tors, helped align the ‘historical time’ (Vogl, 2011: 171) of farming
with the specific temporality of the world of money management
(Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013, p. 8; Ouma and Bläser, 2015). For an
investor or asset manager to know where an asset stands, it must
be possible to ‘‘present-ize” its future value through techniques of
valuation (Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2016). The less contingency
impedes this process, the better. Especially pension funds, who often
promise their clients guaranteed minimum returns on capital, are
interested in securitizing the ‘‘presentization” of future value. There-
fore, turning farmland into a financial asset is about more than sim-
ply investing with a profit. It is about establishing the power to
capitalize future returns (Nitzan and Bichler, 2009). An operations
perspective sensitizes us to the intertwinedness of concrete practices
of financial economization with more general investment rationali-
ties, heuristics, and standards as well as the value regimes shaping
these.
4. Historicizing the finance–farmland nexus
Since capitalism is a highly dynamic system (Harvey, 2010),
operations of agri-finance capital formation have changed over
time. This is why it is important to situate the contemporary
finance-driven version of the global land rush historically in order
to be in a better position to tease out the specific qualities of the
contemporary process. Let us start in Brisbane, Australia.
In September 2014, the Queensland Art Gallery hosted an exhi-
bition called Harvest,11 which engaged with the history, geography,
production and politics of food in Queensland and beyond. The exhi-
bition featured a collection of photographs by Richard Daintree, one
of the first British to explore what is now known as Queensland. A
geologist and photographer, he took some impressive pictures of
the region’s landscape, which he presented, together with geological
maps, at the 1862 International Exhibition in London in a bid to
attract immigrants and investors to the colony (field diary, 2014).
This account shows that neither the use of visual techniques to ren-
der land investible (Li, 2014), nor capital criss-crossing the globe to
invest in farmland and other extractive industries are per se novel
phenomena. While early accounts of the global land rush depicted
the new love affair between finance and food as an ‘unnatural cou-
pling’ (Gosh, 2010), more recent work has shown that the entangle-
ment of finance with agricultural production dates back many
decades, if not centuries (Martin and Clapp, 2015; Ouma, 2015b).
These accounts call for a longue durée perspective (Edelman et al.,
2013: 1528) ‘so that key continuities and shifts are clearly grasped
Sheppard (2002, p. 323) uses the metaphor of a wormhole to argue that under
globalized capitalism, two locations which are spatially distant can still be relation-
ally proximate through technology-mediated flows of communication, authority or
commodities linking them.
10
Zero tillage is a way of growing crops or pasture without disturbing the soil
through ploughing.
11
http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2014/harvest?refer=redirect.
 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
with due to attention to agency and contingency’. This is a welcome
move, and one which casts doubt on the analytical accuracy of
accounts that equate ‘‘financialization” with the period of neoliberal
capitalism (e.g., Harvey, 2007; McMichael, 2012), since finance’s
repeated extension into agriculture at earlier historical conjunctures
could be equally understood in such terms. However, as welcome as
they are, existing historicizations are often done with little system-
aticity and sensitivity to capitalism’s multiple histories.12
A longue durée operations of capital perspective implies engag-
ing with the shifting, place-specific couplings of finance and farm-
land that are nevertheless often co-constituted by global processes.
As finance has been co-producing agricultural landscapes in alli-
ance with farmers and the state around the world for decades,
our engagement with the finance–farmland nexus should be cen-
tered on the question how this has unfolded in different geograph-
ical and historical settings and how this has affected the structure,
management, control and ownership of farms. In this analytical
spirit, Table 1 provides a systematic historicization of the
finance–farmland-nexus for the case of the US, which was selected
due to the high availability of farmland data.13
Finance capital was heavily involved in the colonization of the
US, not just by investing in slave-plantation agriculture, but also
through several land bank initiatives, in which ‘local land owners
pooled mortgages on their land, and issued notes which were
accepted, locally at least, as a form of currency’ (Barry, 2003, p.
3). While farmers usually accessed finance through informal means
throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th century, the US government
entered farmland financing by passing the Federal Farm Loan Act
in 1916, which created the Federal Land Bank System for farm
mortgage lending. It was a direct response to private finance’s
reluctance to invest in agriculture as well as to the political pres-
sure mounted by well-organized farmers.14 What is interesting is
that the government-entry stage of agri-finance capital formation
marks the beginning of increasing land consolidation in the US,
where average farm sizes ‘ballooned between 1910 and 1970, from
138 to 390 acres’ (Axelrod, 2014: 6; see also Weis, 2007: 83). This
suggests that debt-based forms of financial expansion can as much
lead to ‘‘new enclosures” as the equity-based forms currently criti-
cized in much of the land rush literature (Daniel, 2012).
From 1968 to 1986, the US government slowly decreased its
involvement in agricultural finance and banks took over, which
again led to further productivity increases and land consolidation,
with the average farm size during that period reaching 450 acres
(Axelrod, 2014, p. 7).
From 1987 onwards, a time of considerable financial deregula-
tion, we have basically seen the evolution of a market-based stage,
an important antecedent to the current system of agri-finance cap-
ital formation. It is ‘marked by the introduction of more sophisti-
cated agricultural finance’ (Axelrod, 2014, p. 8). At the same
12
I am here less inspired by the varieties of capitalism literature, but more by
postcolonial literature, which is skeptical of accounts of capitalism that imagine its
history along a single trajectory that has its roots in Western ‘‘core economies” (see,
e.g., Taylor, 2010).
13
Obviously, the processes described here have played out differently in other
countries. For instance, in Germany, the government entered agricultural finance
much earlier, and the country has not seen the emergence of a truly market-based
phase. In Australia, the government- and banking-based modes of finance co-existed
for a long time. In much of the Global South, institutions to provide farm credit were
replicated in the 1960, and 1970s (Martin and Clapp, 2015), but the banking-phase
never really took off. What is interesting is that besides finance targeting large-scale
investments in some parts of the Global South, there has also been an increasing
interest in financing smallholders through impact investing or contract farming
schemes. These often work through public–private financing initiatives (McMichael,
2013).
14
At the same time, the government heavily regulated the presence of non-
agricultural entities in commodity futures markets, which emerged in the 19th
century in the US (Cronon, 1992), and even earlier in the UK.
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Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
5
time, farmers were increasingly being provided with ‘‘informal
credit” by agribusiness (input-providers, processors) under
contract-farming schemes (Weis, 2007: 89). These basically act
as ‘merchant-creditors’ (Axelrod, 2014, p. 8).
The current phase of agri-finance capital formation evolved
from such shifts to a market-based system from 2007 onwards,
but also reflects novel developments inside and outside the
domain of finance15: the rise of institutional investors,16 such as
pension and private equity funds, the general acceptance of financial
practices and rationalities, the evolution of an unseen globality of
finance due to regulatory convergence, the proliferation of invest-
ment standards, the crises of established asset classes such as stocks
and bonds, as well as the increased demand for food, agrofuels and
carbon sinks are new developments which made finance take a sec-
ond look at agriculture, something which in the past it had often
found too risky to invest in without state involvement (Martin and
Clapp, 2015). In detail, these developments have resulted in the fol-
lowing novel phenomena:
First, rather than simply underwriting the individual or corpo-
rate control of land and resources (Burch and Lawrence, 2009,
p. 268) or buying of and leasing out land, finance is increasingly
establishing direct ownership and managerial control over produc-
tion, often through private equity-like17 (Daniel, 2012) or corporate
investment structures such as a private investment company18 (Luyt
et al., 2013). As argued earlier, this is often mediated by specialized
asset managers, which in turn collaborate with so-called operators –
hired managers –, nurturing a new form of finance-driven contract-
farming (Sippel et al., 2015, p. 6) (see Fig. 1).
Second, obviously the contemporary version of the finance-
driven land rush happens at a much larger scale. However, it seems
to be less planetary in scope than many academic and industry dis-
courses tend to suggest. Even though some observers have noted
that development finance institutions such as the International
Finance Corporation (IFC) are increasingly teaming up with private
investors to ‘‘unlock value” from farmland in the Global South
(Daniel, 2012), large institutional investors such as Western pen-
sion funds19 seem to mainly focus on four geographical regions:
15
While I agree with Fairbairn (2015a: 211) that the current wave of financial
expansion has unique characteristics, I doubt that these can be identified by
mobilizing the historically blurry notion of ‘‘financialization”.
16
The involvement of large institutional investors in farmland is not a thing of the
recent past (Ouma, 2015b). For instance, in the US, life insurance companies have
more than 80 years of experience investing in farmland (Fritz, 2012), and Continental
Illinois Bank & Merrill Lynch tried to launch a farmland fund as early as 1977, a move
that prompted congressional hearings and was finally stalled (Fritz, 2012). The early
coupling of finance and farmland in the US is also underlined by the fact that it has
been theorized as a potential alternative asset class since at least the late 1960s
(Barry, 1980; Kost, 1968). As financial theory may contribute to the financial
formatting of the world it purports to describe (MacKenzie, 2005), this suggests that
finance permeated farmland markets much earlier than often assumed.
17
‘A private equity fund is a fund established to buy and sell companies, through
buying their equity (or common stock) in the stock market (where a company is said
to be ‘‘public”, that is, available for members of the public to buy or sell) or buying it
from its owners (in the case of a privately held company), and reselling the ownership
claims on the company at a profit’ (Toporowski, 2012: 278). Adopting the generic
private equity model, most agri-focused private equity funds link pension funds,
insurance companies, family offices, foundations, university endowments, high-net
worth individuals and development finance institutions as limited partners (LPs) with
a specialized fund manager, who acts as a general partner (GP) and provides expertise
to acquire and manage investments.
18
These are private entities, in which investors can buy and sell shares, offering
more liquidity than a closed-end fund. A model common in parts of Eastern Europe, as
well as in New Zealand and Australia is that investors buy land or shares in a holding
company managed by an asset manager, which either co-invests alongside the former
owner, leases back the land to a specialized operator, or installs a new farm manager.
19
These are ‘asset class makers’ in their own right due to the vast amounts of capital
they administer. In 2011, institutional investors had assets worth USD 84.8 trillion
under their management (Çelik and Isaksson, 2014: 97).
6 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx

Table 1
Finance’s co-production of agricultural landscapes in the US, 1860–2015. Source: Own design; based on Axelrod (2014).

Informally Government-based period Bank-based period (1968–1986) Market-based period I Market-based period II (2008–)
served period (1916–1967) (1987–2007)
(1860–1915)
Government role Government role Government role Government role Government role
Little to no Expanding available credit, working Oversight and regulation Deregulation General reregulation of financial
involvement through farm-level organizations; markets in the wake of the financial
enhancing agricultural productivity crisis, but no reregulation of
more broadly agricultural finance
Sources of farm Sources of farm financing Sources of farm financing Sources of farm financing Sources of farm financing
financing Debt: government-supported Debt: commercial lenders’ share of Debt: banks, securities, Shift from debt to equity: increasing
Debt: non- community lenders agricultural debt is greater than or equal to ‘‘merchant creditors” importance of private equity, REITs
institutional government-sponsored institutions; and other sophisticated financial
moneylenders informal lenders are a minority structures
Farm structure Farm structure Farm structure Farm structure Farm structure
Smallholders Decrease in smallholders as land Land consolidation intensifies Split between large Large-scale commercial farms that are
and tenant consolidation increases commercial and ‘institutional-grade’; other large and
farmers smallholder farms with smallholder farms with links to
links to merchant merchant creditors
creditors
Farm productivity Farm productivity Farm productivity Farm productivity Farm productivity
Low Increased input use drives rising Productivity further increases High High
productivity
Nature of Nature of financial economization Nature of financial economization Nature of financial Nature of financial economization
financial Extensive Extensive–intensive economization Intensive–appropriative (direct
economization Intensive–captive ownership of farmland)
Extensive

Fig. 1. Investors, intermediaries and investment structures in the agricultural finance space. Source: own research; Buxton et al., 2012, p. 3.

‘(...) Australia/New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and the United institutional equity structures invested in primary agriculture.
States. These regions account for more than 80 percent of the The four most-favoured regions are also seen as accounting
current and targeted value of investments globally and over for ‘‘about 65-70% of the currently investable market in farm-
64 percent of the number of individual funds and other land globally” (...)’ (Luyt et al., 2013, p. 32).

Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
What these regions have in common is a strong agricultural
potential, well-developed farmland markets, a significant depth
in farming expertise, and effective legal and contracting processes,
with each of them being a net food exporting region (Luyt et al.,
2013). These are ‘‘institutional-grade” investment regions because
they match the risk-return horizons of large institutional investors.
Third, finance’s current interest in all things agricultural goes
beyond the sphere of production. Investment structures such as
mutual funds have emerged, which are specialized, sector-
focused funds that invest in stock-listed companies. As part of a
more generic financial economization of food industries,
agriculture-oriented mutual funds often not only invest in land-
owning, production-oriented companies, but also place their
capital along the whole agricultural value chain from input, over
production to logistics and retailing (Burch and Lawrence, 2013;
Isakson, 2014). One representative of an asset management com-
pany was keen to emphasize that the real money lies there, not
in agricultural production, so he could not understand why NGOs
made all this noise about farmland investments (interview, 2015).
Fourth, some larger agribusiness firms, such as Cargill, have
themselves morphed into financial intermediaries by providing
asset management services, in addition to their often-speculative
activities in commodity markets. They do so by using their insider
knowledge on land markets and commodity price movements and
their access to large tracts of land in Latin America and other parts
of the world (Salerno, 2014).
Fifth, the financial asset character of farmland is intensified
through the securitization of aggregated income streams from var-
ious farming properties into the form of (publically-traded)
exchange-traded farmland funds or corporations (Fairbairn, 2014;
Gunnoe, 2014; Sommerville and Magnan, 2015; Stevenson, 2014).
Finally, investors, including retail investors, may get exposure
to farmland by investing in listed equities of agricultural compa-
nies, a rather classic way of capitalizing agriculture.
Fig. 1 disentangles the complex actor-networks that are usually
lumped together or obscured in the existing literature on the ‘‘fi-
nancialization of farmland”. Taken together, the actor-networks
depicted here make up farmland/agriculture as an ‘‘emerging alter-
native asset class”. Its evolution has been marked by the ‘integra-
tion of new sources of capital, new instruments and vehicles, and
new forms of both ‘‘productive” and ‘‘speculative” investment’ into
farmland (and agriculture), ‘which, in effect, reflect a new demand
for investment opportunities’ (Sommerville and Magnan, 2015,
p.126). This represents a unique historical situation for finance
itself, because it involves the internal reorientation and reorganiza-
tion of the money management industry. Farmland can only be
reframed as an ‘‘alternative asset class” if it is ontologically recon-
figured. ‘Ontological reconfiguration’ (Çalısßkan and Callon, 2010, p.
25) here means not merely that farmland needs to be ‘disembed-
ded’ and abstracted so that it can be incorporated into established
sociolegal/-technical and worth architectures of global finance;
rather, ‘the social relations with which the new resource was
entangled’ are reformatted, extending ‘the network of actors and
devices connected to it’ (Li, 2014, p. 590).
All in all, a more nuanced historicization of the finance–farm-
land nexus does not simply call for bringing in history, but for
bringing in diverse histories. Accounts from the ‘‘the margins”
may eventually destabilize dominant understanding of the ‘‘finan-
cialization of farmland”. For instance, one of the arguments in the
dedicated literature has been that ‘hungry capital’ (Russi, 2013)
threatened smaller farmers by contributing to rising land values
and that it would potentially lead to material dispossession and
decreasing food security among affected rural communities in
the wake of the corporatization of the food system. Typically, these
arguments have been formulated for farmers and rural communi-
ties in the Global South (Cotula, 2013). While these are important
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
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7
political and moral questions, Williams (2014: 7) argues that
within these accounts ‘farmers tend to emerge (...) as not only pas-
sive victims of the financialized food system, with finance proceed-
ing more or less unopposed, but also as a singular and
undifferentiated group. This of course overlooks important differ-
ences among farmers, their relative assertions of agency and the
limits of financialization as an ongoing pursuit rather than simply
a description of reality.’
Insights from my own research illustrate this. During fieldwork
in Australia in 2014, I visited the ‘Drought, Finance and Future’-
summit in rural Queensland, organized by a young, concerned
farmer-entrepreneur from ‘‘the bush”. Here farmers, struck by
years of prolonged drought and piling debts, would meet private
equity investors to discuss the future of Australian agriculture.
One of the big themes was that the common way of financing Aus-
tralian agriculture, by taking on debt from banks and by upscaling
farms to be able to service it (Lawrence, 1989, p. 242), was no
longer sustainable. Instead, fund managers, researchers and indus-
try experts promoted private equity investments as the future of
Australian farming. Mark⁄,20 a farmer who had been hard hit by
drought and debt for the past three years, said he ‘had never seen
so many resilient men struggling, because they see the assets their
fathers and forefathers build withering away’. He was convinced that
‘we got so much happen here and the thing that is holding us back is
finance’. Several of the other conference participants argued that
what Australian agriculture needed most was ‘good capital’ (i.e.
long-term private equity), not ‘bad capital’ (i.e. bank-issued debt
capital). Responding to the media criticism that rural Australia was
sold to foreigners,21 a local politician argued that there was no prob-
lem with foreign investment in Australian farmland since the whole
country had been ‘built on foreign capital’ (field diary, 2014).
At an investment conference in Singapore and during fieldwork
in neighboring New Zealand, I met several farmers/farm managers
who made a case for (foreign) equity capital investing into farm-
land as long as this was done through equal partnerships. In Singa-
pore, one large-scale farmer from the US noted that in case a
financial investor ventured into US farming operations and would
like to assume too much control (as it is the case with private
equity-type models), ‘this would be a tough play because many
farmers are also very entrepreneurial, so we need more partners
rather than owners’ (field diary, 2013).
Based on these accounts, it can be argued that the contempo-
rary financial economization of farmland may mean very different
things in different agrarian contexts. In a settler-colonial economy
such as Australia, whose history is tightly entangled with foreign
finance capital, which has embraced a neoliberal model of agricul-
ture since the 1980s (Pritchard, 2005), and where the future of
many family farms is uncertain owing to rising levels of indebted-
ness and the old age of farmers (Cullen, 2014), equity capital taking
over or jointly investing in farms alongside farmers is seen as land-
revitalizing rather than a land-grabbing force.22
5. Disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus
If one subscribes to the notion of the spatial fix, one basically
also subscribes to the notion of circuits of capital (Harvey, 1982).
The latter has become a convenient means to assume that capital
circulates because of its inherent properties. This kind of analytics
often misses the operative dimensions of circulation – ‘the
20
All names marked as ⁄ are pseudonyms.
21
For details, see Sippel et al. (2015).
22
While many farmers in Australia seem to be open to foreign investment from the
Anglo-Saxon world, there appears to be some reservation or even outright public
resentment against foreign investments from the Gulf States, China or Indonesia (see
also Sippel, 2015).
8 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
formative stages, the processes and practices that shape and gener-
ate the flows and circulation’ (Pryke, 2006, p. 63).
The notion of operations instead highlights that the coming into
being of capital hinges upon establishing often far-flung connec-
tions that enroll and reformat organizations, economic relations,
labor and nature itself at different sites in often surprising config-
urations. It helps disentangle how the connections sustaining the
workings of finance capital are made: ‘(a)side from the material
infrastructures required to establish such articulations, there is a
need for rules, instructions and standards that guide and frame
the operative principles at stake in these dynamics’ (Mezzadra
and Neilson, 2013, p. 15). Making such connections is as much a
matter of financial engineering as it is of material engineering
(French et al., 2011).23
These connections are entanglements of diverse actors such as
end investors, asset managers, agribusiness companies, intermedi-
aries (industry intelligence, placement agents, due diligence provi-
ders, etc.), as well as national and regional governments, local
elites, communities and the farming properties themselves. At
one end of the spectrum, we may have a case such as the US pen-
sion fund giant TIAA-CREF, who in 2010 acquired its own asset
manager, and who now uses this in-house expertise to offer
institutional-grade deals to other pension funds who are hungry
for farmland, but do not have the capabilities or risk-appetite to
do this on their own. This is done through a corporate structure
(‘‘co-investment platform”), under which farmland is acquired
but then leased out to operators to generate constant income
streams. This deal architecture has the advantage that it is rather
simple and does not involve the short-termism and fee frenzy of
the private equity model.24 At the other end of the spectrum, we
may find a specialized, boutique-style asset manager who manages
a range of farming properties and assets downstream and upstream
the value chain ‘‘private-equity style” around the world. Because
some of the ‘‘assets under management” have been secured through
‘‘informal” connections in high-risk (but potentially high-return)
countries such as Zambia, Tanzania or India, this asset manager does
not cater for your typical US pension fund, but for more risk-taking
financial entities, such as ‘‘high net-worth individuals”. A TIAA-CREF
would find it hard to invest in such ‘‘geographies”. Various interme-
diate forms exist in between these two poles.
The contemporary extension of finance’s operations from shiny
office towers in urban areas into rural spaces around the world
produces socio-spatial formations that are yet to be fully under-
stood. The farm in Tanzania mentioned earlier appears to be a local
farm. Indeed, for most neighbors and adjacent communities, the
farm is known to be run by bwana (Mr.) Jim⁄, who has lived in
the area for many years. However, the farm, which is administered
by an Asian asset manager on behalf of a large institutional client
from Europe, more resembles a ‘global territory’ (Opitz and
Tellmann, 2012). Here, the operations of private equity materialize
– minimize risks, optimize returns, align interests, unlock value,
exit. If territory can be ‘broadly understood as the workings of
power’ (Elden, 2010, p. 804), then this begs the question what kind
of power is actually at work in the resource territories of global
finance?
23
The focus on material engineering is important here, because large-scale
appropriations of farmland often involve considerable investments into material
infrastructure, logistics, irrigation, precision farming and real time farm management
in order to align the farm with the requirements, conventions and temporality of the
world of money management. This is particularly the case for ‘‘greenfield invest-
ments”, but also applies to the rehabilitation of existing farming properties.
24
Private equity asset managers in established financial domains usually charge
investors a 2% annual management fee and are given 20% of the overall net profit on
investments. Since the financial crisis, this model has been criticized by many
observers in the financial industry for the incentive structure it creates and the ‘‘value
transfer” it implies (Monk, 2012).
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
To fully understand how the networks of agri-finance capital
formation expand, how they work through the materiality of farm-
land and how they make it amenable to space-time and risk-return
calculations (Pryke, 2012, p. 1), we need to unpack categories that
are usually taken for granted in the land rush literature: capital,
resources, property, value. Each of these ‘‘things” is produced dif-
ferently in different geographical settings, while at the same time
being shaped by more general principles of abstraction circulating
in global financial markets.
5.1. On capital
It is particularly in the critical political economy literature on
‘‘financialization” (Lapavitsas, 2011; Zeller, 2010) that finance cap-
ital is imagined as an abstract entity, which circulates around the
globe as a function of its profit-seeking imperative, thereby
impacting adversely on households, communities, companies,
regions, and ecosystems. We also encounter this ghostly figure in
much of the land rush literature (e.g., McMichael, 2012).
In this regard, it is often forgotten that ‘‘capital” does not simply
impact on socio-material relations as a fait accompli, but is actually
made up by them (French et al., 2011, p. 801). Capital, like money
more generally, is ‘a social relation, a symbolic system and a mate-
rial reality’ (Maurer, 2006: 27, cited in Christophers, 2011, p. 1070).
Finance, be it in the credit or credit-plus-interest form, is an effect
of discursive, material and social relations at once (de Goede,
2005). Capital is socio-technical work. This applies especially to
the new ‘frontier regions’ (Mitchell, 2007; Ouma, 2015a) of the
finance-driven land rush, where this work still needs to be orga-
nized and performed in the very first place: the ‘taming of nature’
(Prudham, 2003), the extravert organization of production to meet
the demands of end investors, the formal and real subsumption of
labor, the establishment of property rights, the management of
political opposition and the alignment of the historical time of
farming with the temporality of finance are all laborious acts in
the financial economization of farmland. The words of an investor
behind a large-scale grain farming project in Central Tanzania are
telling in this regard:
‘In some ways it’s a very sobering example. My firm has no
interest in bad investments. We only want to make good invest-
ments. But we have been open-minded about making good
investments that are very bad career choices (...). It’s a green-
field agricultural project, and people tell you that can’t be done.
It’s in Africa, which is far outside the risk spectrum for most
people. Besides a fundamental issue that you’re trying to make
a viable business in a sector where today it’s uncompetitive. If
you succeed, you look really smart and everyone says it’s obvi-
ous, but most of the time you don’t, and then you look really,
really dumb (...). The simple thing was not going to work. At
every level you’re noncompetitive if you’re in this part of the
world. Lack of training, corruption. Of the biblical plagues,
we’ve had most of them: locusts, flooding, malaria, I forget what
else’ (source withheld to retain anonymity).
Many investors in Africa and elsewhere have faced similar chal-
lenges with making their investments financially productive
(Cotula, 2013; Li, 2015). However, even in cases where financial
investors invest into existing farming operations such as in the
US, Australia or New Zealand, one should not assume that finance
works smoothly through farmland’s materiality: ‘(t)he operative
dimensions of capital are crisscrossed by contestations that occur
at several different levels and many different sites’ (Mezzadra
and Neilson, 2013, p. 10). If ‘(c)apital should be a defined as a pro-
cess rather than a thing’ (Harvey, 1982, p. 20), then the circum-
stances of its accomplishment matter for they can acquire a
 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx 9

disruptive quality. Thus, we need to move from circuits of agri- generate constant income streams (Leyshon and Thrift, 2007), but
finance Kapital to the frictional enrollments for agri-finance capital from an expected appreciation of its value over time (capital gains)
formation (Callon and Latour, 1981; Russi, 2013). (Fairbairn, 2014). To fully realize this value, one needs to be able
to sell the asset with the underlying ownership rights on ‘efficient’
land markets. This is not the case for parts of Eastern Europe (such
5.2. On resources
as Ukraine) or Africa (such as Ghana or Tanzania), where foreigners
often can only acquire leasehold rights or where land tenure
Much of the existing land rush literature implicitly assumes
arrangements require investors/and or farm managers to become
that finance works smoothly through the materiality of farmland.
‘political entrepreneurs’ (Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2016, p. 12) and
This misses that land, like labor and money, is not just a ‘fictitious
forge alliances with local, regional or national power brokers. While
commodity’ as Polanyi (2001[1944]: 71–80) famously put it; it also
it is true that ‘even where ownerships rights to land cannot exist,
often exposes an unruliness that challenges the circulatory appara-
companies/land can change owners through share sales’ (Cotula,
tus of finance. As I argued in a previous commentary, it is not for
2013, p. 37), such incomplete property rights pose an entry barrier
nothing that a common joke on agri-investment conferences is
to the more risk-adverse or liquidity-seeking factions of finance cap-
‘how to make one million in agriculture? Invest two!’ (Ouma,
ital, such as Northern pension funds and insurance companies.
2015b). Thus, even though it may be tempting to make the finan-
For instance, with regard to the Central and Eastern Europe and
cial economization of farmland part of the ‘capitalization of almost
Commonwealth of Independent States regions, often hailed as one
everything’ (Leyshon and Thrift, 2007), farmland’s specific material
of the prime frontiers of the finance-driven version of the global
and symbolic properties impede a quick economization: the dis-
land rush in the literature (Luyt et al., 2013), one representative
tinctive nature of farmland as a scarce, localized, socioecologically
of a large European asset manager noted that even though there
embedded, life-sustaining and potentially political resource make
may have been some ‘success stories’ over the past years, these
it ‘an awkward, resistant or incomplete commodity’ (Li, 2014,
were ‘non-replicable and are not suitable for institutional inves-
p. 592).25
tors....they are non-replicable because someone goes there with
Farmland’s ‘resourceness’ (Li, 2014, p. 589), similar to capital’s
his Kalashnikov....or marries into a family and assimilates himself
‘‘capitalness”, can hardly be taken for granted in ontological terms.
and plays by the local rules and these are other rules than we play
Both work in agrarian political economy (Mann and Dickinson,
by’ (interview, 2013). The investors behind the central Tanzanian
1978), as well as work in political ecology has shown this
grain operation mentioned earlier had to resettle and compensate
(Prudham, 2003). More recent work on resources and resource
local farmers settling on ‘‘their” land despite the fact that they had
extraction in geography and anthropology helps shed further light
acquired the title for the 4000 ha-plus property from a state
on the fact that the resources through which returns of capital are
agency, and thereby the legal means to exclude others (field diary,
generated are never given as such, but are made geographically
2013). In other cases, it may be difficult to establish legitimate
and historically through material, discursive and relational invest-
property rights or carve these out from existing socio-
ments (Barney, 2009; Li, 2014; Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014).
institutional relations surrounding land. What counts as legal does
Additionally, ‘resources are far more than economic’ (Bakker
not need to be considered legitimate by all parts of society, as Greco
and Bridge, 2006, p. 13). While observers suggest that ‘extraeco-
(2015) has shown for a farm backed by foreign private equity in
nomic actors’ such as states play a central role in the process of
South-West Tanzania.
farmland-based capital formation (Fairbairn, 2015b; Greco, 2015;
Again, in other cases corporate/institutional landownership
Martin and Clapp, 2015), the extraeconomic forces mediating
may be legally prohibited. In the US, the heartland of pension-
agri-finance investments are yet to be fully explored (Williams,
fund capitalism and capitalist agriculture, there are restrictions
2014). This insight calls for further investigating how the topolog-
on nonresident/corporate/institutional or foreign landownership
ical networks of agri-finance intersect with the material, social,
in nine states, all of them Plains states such as Iowa,28 Nebraska
institutional and political realities of target regions (Visser et al.,
or Missouri – mainly to protect the ‘‘All American family farm”. Dur-
2015). It also asks us to unpack the both productive and constrain-
ing an interview in the US, an industry observer noted the frictions
ing power of investment and, tax regimes, as well as the modalities
between state law and federal law in this regard. While he under-
of state-investment relations in regions where finance goes farm-
lined that pension funds and other institutional investors have
ing and how these shape investors’ access26 to natural ‘‘resources”.
increased their lobbying with states to open their lands to financial
capital, he also emphasized that their bid saw a setback after the Sas-
5.3. On property katchewan regional government barred the Canada Pension Plan
Investment Board (CPPIB) from acquiring more farmland in the pro-
In this regard, property plays a central role, not only because it vince, in addition to the $120 mn investment it had already made
is essential for any investor’s project of economization, but also (interview, 2015). The fear was its additional land purchases would
because it lies at the core of the ‘‘value creation” process of most ‘squeeze local farming businesses on land values’ (Burwood-Taylor,
investors and asset managers (Christophers, 2010).27 Much of an 2015; see also Magnan, 2015).
asset’s projected future value derives not only from its ability to All these cases are about the constraining role of property
regimes. However, one should equally engage with the productive
25
Fairbairn (2014: 782), drawing on Coakley (1994), makes a similar point: role of such regimes: in Australia and New Zealand, for instance,
farmland’s ‘imperfect substitutability, its illiquidity and its limited divisibility (...) governments (and some opposition parties) have developed a very
mean that it is only a ‘‘quasi-financial asset” in which rent and interest remain open stance towards (foreign)29 investment in farmland (Lawrence,
analytically distinct.’
26
The emphasis on access, defined as ‘the ability to derive benefits from things’
(Ribot and Peluso, 2003: 153), is important here, because it calls for an analysis of ‘the
28
constellations of means, relations, and processes that enable (...) [finance] to derive For instance, the law for Iowa reads: ‘Nonresident alien, foreign business or
benefits from resources’ (Ribot and Peluso, 2003). Relations of access in many frontier foreign government may acquire real property except for agricultural land or interest
regions of the finance-driven farmland rush are likely to be more complex and in agricultural land as a citizen and resident of the US’ (National Association of
multilayered than the existing literature suggests. Realtors, 2006: 6).
27 29
As Williams (2014: 25) notes correctly, ‘the financialization literature, not only in Interestingly, while foreign pension funds have invested heavily in Australian
relation to food and agriculture but also other economic fields, has paid scant farmland, local players such as Australian superannuation funds have been very
attention to the role of law and thus the legal dimensions of financialization.’ reluctant (Magnan, 2015).

Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
10 S. Ouma / Geoforum xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
2012; Sippel, 2015). Yet even Australia has seen a wind of change
with regard to its investment and property regime. Reacting to
increased public scrutiny, the then Prime Minister announced in
early 2015 that from March 1st onwards the threshold for scrutiny
of farmland sales to foreign private entities by the Foreign Invest-
ment Review Board (FIRB) would be lowered to a cumulative $15
million, down from $240 million. He was quick though to point
out that this was not a move against foreign capital. After all, ‘Aus-
tralia was built on foreign investment from Britain, the United States
and Japan’ (Vidot, 2015).
These empirical illustrations relate to the more general histori-
cal fact that propertied space is the outcome of a ‘productive pro-
cess’ (Elden, 2010, p. 806; Li, 2014). The material, social, political
and legal aspects of this process can be disentangled empirically.
With spaces of finance it is no different.
5.4. On value
The study of ‘‘financial markets” and how they work through
the materiality of nature and local political economies must even-
tually go further than just historicizing and disentangling the
finance–farmland-nexus. As Christophers (2014, p. 15) notes in a
piece that seeks to reconcile critical political economy and
practice-oriented approaches to markets, the latter ‘must be stud-
ied not only for their own sake, but also for their direct salience to
the productive and value-creative sphere.’ An operations of capital
perspective suggests that something such as farmland does not
have an inherent financial worth that can be ‘‘unlocked” – a com-
mon narrative in contemporary financial markets (Christophers,
2010; Ducastel and Anseeuw, 2016; Orléan, 2014). Creating an ‘‘as-
set” with financial worth is a productive process, which is often
contested (Magnan, 2015).
For some observers, this means to engage critically with how
finance creates ‘‘value” from agriculture30:
‘Part of the problem has been a disconnect between what corpo-
rate or investment bankers think they know about agriculture
and what they actually do know. Even when a banker partners
with a farmer, in my experience the greed rubs off and one is no
less greedy than the other (...). There have also been highly dis-
connected projections of returns and what is actually achiev-
able. There is this idea that you can make private equity type
returns but that is very rarely possible so the industry needs
to employ some realism. Another big issue is fund managers
that charge fees when they make a farm investment. This is
nonsensical in farmland because you are not instantly buying
wealth when you buy a farm; it incentivizes the fund manager
to buy fast, not well, which is obviously counter-intuitive for
the investor’ (Burwood-Taylor, 2014).
For others, including this author, this means highlighting that
contemporary operations of agri-finance capital formation embody
‘a technology of power which uses the money form to quantify
human and physical contexts, privilege financial parameters in
decision making, and ultimately return decisions over resources
in favour of money-holders in contexts of contested uses and
meanings for the non-human world’ (Bracking, 2012, p. 272).
6. Conclusion
The contribution of this paper to a ‘‘beyond land grabbing”
research programme has been threefold. First, it was argued that
30
Note here that many of my own interviewees would distance themselves from a
‘‘Wall Street-gone-farming” mentality. Especially institutional investors try to
emphasize that they are long-term investors for whom social impact and sustain-
ability matter.
Please cite this article in press as: Ouma, S. From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus.
Geoforum (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.02.003
‘‘financialization” as being currently used in the finance-oriented
land rush literature is a problematic analytical concept. Among
others, accounts utilizing it often have little to say about histori-
cally and geographically situated practical activities of finance.
Building on the concept of operations of capital, I proposed an
alternative analytics, which attunes us to the modalities, processes
and practices of financial economization that have reworked orga-
nizations (such as farms), economic relations, labor and nature in
particular geographical contexts and at particular historical con-
junctures. Second, I suggested that the coupling of finance and
farmland/agriculture has a long history, and the new quality of
the contemporary entanglements between finance and farmland
only becomes fully visible if embedded into capitalism’s multiple
histories. Often, earlier rounds of financial economization in con-
junction with other forces provide the foundation for the contem-
porary financial economization of agricultural resources. For
instance, in Australia the provision of debt to farmers to finance
costly expansion plans coupled with a prolonged drought led to
the indebtedness of many farms, which now facilitates the entry
of equity capital into the farming sector. Third, I showed that com-
ing to terms with the operations of agri-finance capital formation
would eventually require overcoming pregiven notions of capital,
resources, property and value. This also calls for rematerializing
the operative dimension of farmland investments – a political act
in its own right.
Acknowledgements
Research informing this paper benefited from the support of the
Friends and Supporters of Frankfurt University and the Center of
Interdisciplinary African Studies at Frankfurt University. I would
like to thank Kerstin Bläser, Antoine Ducastel, Leigh Johnson, Peter
Lindner, Jane Pollard, Rasmus Hundsbaek and Lars Buur for com-
ments on earlier version of this paper, as well as the three anony-
mous reviewers and Padraig Carmody, whose comments have
greatly improved it. I would also like to thank Mangasini Katundu
and Moshi Cooperative University for their research support in
Tanzania as well as Geoffrey Lawrence, who provided some vital
information on the Australian case. Finally, I am grateful to the
the many people who have allocated their scarce time to support
this project as interviewees. I am solely responsible for the con-
tents of this paper.
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