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Epilogue

Stefan Ouma
Affiliation:
Universität Bayreuth, Germany
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Summary

In 2018 something remarkable happened to Mr and Mrs Scheper, two retired medical doctors from Germany. They had discovered that their retirement provider was co-invested in a fund in South America, whose farming operations had been accused of gross social and environmental misconduct (Schwab 2018). As decades-old supporters of indigenous struggles in Brazil (with personal experience in the field), they were particularly shocked at what seemed to have happened to their retirement savings. This discovery was remarkable, because they got a glimpse of capital's own methods, the transnational circuits of money that evolve from it and the potential local impacts of these flows – a rare moment in the world of distantiated and delegation-based investment chains. Although the case of the fund under scrutiny remains hotly debated, this real-life story returns us to a key concern of this book: to open the black box of finance's role in farming, to engage critically with the institutional landscapes that have emerged from this trend in different historio-geographical settings and to explore how this has affected the structure, management, control and ownership of different agricultural ventures. In pursuing this goal, I have also aimed to fill some gaps that are rarely talked about in the existing debate, such as engaging with the data problem related to the finance-driven land rush, the role of the state as a regulator and potential source of investor information, the layered moral struggles related to the assetization of farming and the question of what role “finance” – broadly defined – can play in achieving more sustainable and just food futures. Well aware that the assetization of farming is more than just about farmland, this book has often reached out to assetization dynamics at the pre-and post-farm-gate stages, and provided the intellectual resources to understand the emergence, operation and internal universe of “agriculture as an alternative asset class” in broader terms. This broader view is also important against the backdrop of more recent dynamics. With the increasing entry of financial investors into the “AG tech” sector in recent years, finance now increasingly touches farming from two sides: the ownership of land and other farm assets, and the technologies used to control and manage production across time and space.

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Farming as Financial Asset
Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
, pp. 181 - 182
Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Epilogue
  • Stefan Ouma, Universität Bayreuth, Germany
  • Book: Farming as Financial Asset
  • Online publication: 20 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788211888.011
Available formats
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Save book to Dropbox

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  • Epilogue
  • Stefan Ouma, Universität Bayreuth, Germany
  • Book: Farming as Financial Asset
  • Online publication: 20 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788211888.011
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Stefan Ouma, Universität Bayreuth, Germany
  • Book: Farming as Financial Asset
  • Online publication: 20 December 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788211888.011
Available formats
×