Food security or commercial business? Gulf State investments in Australian agriculture

Worldwide investments in agricultural land have gained much attention in recent years, resulting in renewed awareness of land as being a scarce and finite resource. This paper investigates a case of South-to-North land deals, namely investments from the Arab Gulf targeting agricultural land in Australia. For the Arab Gulf States that highly depend on external food supplies, investment abroad is one strategy to guarantee future food security. At the same time, leading Australian political and economic representatives have been eager to attract investments from the Gulf. Increasing foreign investment in Australian land has, however, provoked a vivid public debate in Australia. Concepts of foreign direct investment and its role are currently renegotiated on the federal level with regard to Australia's own food security, the ‘national interest’ and the redefinition of ‘Australian agricultural land’. While these concerns also play out on the local level, investments have to be seen within the wider context of Australian ruralities. The paper reveals how food security and commercial and financial interests intersect and become blurred within current transformations of the global agri-food system.     

Food and finance: the financial transformation of agro-food supply chains

This article draws upon existing literature to document and describe the rise of finance in food provisioning. It queries the role of financialization in the contemporary food crisis and analyzes its impacts upon the distribution of power and wealth within and along the generalized agro-food supply chain. A systematic treatment of key nodes in the supply chain reveals four key insights: (1) the line between finance and food provisioning has become increasingly blurred in recent decades, with financial actors taking a growing interest in food and agriculture and agro-food enterprises becoming increasingly involved in financial activities; (2) financialization has reinforced the position of food retailers as the dominant actors within the agro-food system, though they are largely subject to the dictates of finance capital and face renewed competition from financialized commodity traders; (3) financialization has intensified the exploitation of food workers, increasing their workload while pushing down their real wages and heightening the precarity of their positions, and (4) small-scale farmers have been especially hard hit by financialization, as their livelihoods have become even more uncertain due to increasing volatility in agricultural markets, they have become weaker vis-à-vis other actors in the agro-food supply chain, and they face growing competition for their farmland. The paper concludes by identifying themes for future research and asking readers to reimagine the role of finance in food provisioning.     

Financialization,distance and global food politics

This paper provides a new perspective on the political implications of intensified financialization in the global food system. There has been a growing recognition of the role of finance in the global food system, in particular the way in which financial markets have become a mode of accumulation for large transnational agribusiness players within the current food regime. This paper highlights a further political implication of agrifood system financialization, namely how it fosters ‘distancing’ in the food system and how that distance shapes the broader context of global food politics. Specifically, the paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, a new kind of distancing has emerged within the global food system as a result of financialization that has (a) increased the number of the number and type of actors involved in global agrifood commodity chains and (b) abstracted food from its physical form into highly complex agricultural commodity derivatives. Second, this distancing has obscured the links between financial actors and food system outcomes in ways that make the political context for opposition to financialization especially challenging.     

From boomerangs to minefields and catapults: dynamics of trans-local resistance to land-grabs

This paper explores the political processes that activists engaged in contesting land grabbing have triggered to connect claims across borders and to international institutions, regimes and processes. Through a review of cases of land-grab resistance that have led to project cancelation or suspension, I argue that contextual elements of the land grab and shifting geopolitics highlight the need for adaptation and refinement of models of transnational advocacy, historically structured in North–South patterns. For example, while some elements of the boomerang pattern of transnational advocacy are still relevant, changing realities call for new empirically enriched models. To this end, I outline two typologies of political contention that can help us conceptualize multi-scalar interactions between activists to demonstrate the impact of local resistances at larger scales – ‘the catapult effect’ and the ‘minefield effect’. This paper contributes to calls for further theorization to understand how feedback processes between international discourses, meso-politics and conflicts and resistance at local sites of production impact the implementation of contested land deals.     

Debating Economic Democracy in South Korea: The Costs of Commensurability

ABSTRACT:

In the 2012 Korean presidential election, both liberal and conservative parties fought their campaigns on the slogan of “economic democratization,” marking a strong departure from past presidential elections and the growth-first policies of the then-incumbent conservative administration. Both parties pledged to tackle growing social polarization and the concentration of economic power by reforming the corporate governance of Korea's large, family-led conglomerates (chaebol), to the degree that chaebol reform itself became synonymous with economic democratization. This focus led to a series of heated exchanges among liberal-left reformers about the vision of economic democratization being promoted, with one camp favoring the creation of a “fair market” through the restructuring of the chaebol and another promoting the protection of the chaebol’s management rights over their affiliates as a desirable strategy for the creation of a Korean welfare state. This essay examines the long-standing tensions between these two liberal-left perspectives and argues that the capital-centric and market-based visions these camps promoted risk confining intellectual debate over the meaning of economic democracy within boundaries that serve dominant political interests.     

The political economy of local government financialization and the role of policy diffusion

By analyzing why English local governments have made extensive use of long-term market loans with embedded derivatives, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on local government financialization. Using an original, large-N panel dataset for the period from 1998 to 2014, we show that the configuration of the local political economy is an important driver of financialization processes: a Labour Party majority as well as fiscal and economic stress make it more likely that councils adopt risky financial instruments. As the use of financial innovations has also diffused geographically, policy diffusion impacts local governments as well. Highlighting the conditional effect of finance sector power, which only increases the use of financial innovations in very large councils, as well as the temporal dimension of fiscal and economic stress, we create ample avenues for further research.     

A farewell to urban/rural bias: peripheral finance capitalism in Mexico

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that the peripheral financialized economy is a rural–urban economy. On the one hand, agriculture and industry are bifurcated into a growing export sector and a stagnating local economy, and there are no functional ‘developmental’ links between capitalist agriculture and industry. On the other hand, the economic structures have resulted in the consolidation of a huge mass of rural–urban ‘classes of labour’. Capitalist agriculture and industry are linked through and dependent on cheap labour sustaining the export economy. I argue that the current economic formation is not due to ‘urban bias’, ‘rural bias’ or any misallocation of resources among economic sectors. Rather, it can be explained in relation to ‘finance bias’: the taking over of debt relations as the key driving force of economic activities. A major contradiction in peripheral finance capitalism arises from the financing of cheap labour through debt. This is likely to result in new financial crisis, when the contradictions between increasing levels of (private and public) debt, a stagnating domestic economy, and below-subsistence level wages become too large.     

Reaction to Grain Financialization: Protection of Farmer Client Rights about the Legislation on Grain Futures in China

Grain security should be emphasized to develop diversified grain market in the perspective of grain financialization, so as to realize the unification of grain spot market and futures market. New farmers should change from the traditional grain production to the hedging and risk aversion of the futures market and become the new and basic clients. Legislation on the grain futures should protect farmer rights for the unification with the rights of the grain futures company and the government financial security and grain security, which is guarantees the value of law to be free, fair and secure. Regarding the obviously weak position of farmers, major concern of academic study should focus on the frauds of grain futures company, such as the liability subject, subjective fault, fraudulent conduct, harmful aftereffect and causality. The Futures Act and Grain Act are supposed to contain the liability system that covers the civil liability, administrative liability, criminal liability and social liability in order to respond to the grain financialization effectively.     

The land grab and corporate food regime restructuring

Land grab appears to be a phenomenal expression of deepening contradictions in the corporate food regime. In particular, the end of cheap food (signaled in the 2008 ‘food crisis’) has generated renewed interest in agriculture for development on the part of the development industry, matched by a rising interest in offshore land investments, driven by governments securing food and fuel exports and financiers speculating on commodity futures and land price inflation. This paper interprets these developments as illusory solutions to a fundamental accumulation crisis of the neoliberal project. While this new (and final?) enclosure registers a restructuring of the food regime, as its geopolitical relations and productive content re-centers on Southern land and an emergent bioeconomic imperative, it is likely to only buy time (and space) in the short run for political and economic elites and a global consuming class. In the longer run, the attempt to resolve food regime contradictions by a spatial fix may well be catastrophic.     

Situating tenure,capital and finance in farmland relations: implications for stewardship and agroecological health in Ontario,Canada

Farmers in Canada are older and more capitalized than ever before. Meanwhile, farmland values continue to rise. These forces together are generating unprecedented shifts in farmland relations, marked by increasing reliance on rental tenure and the rise of hybrid owner–renter consolidating farmers. This paper explores these dynamics in Ontario and asks how they are impacting on-farm agroecological stewardship. To do so, we begin with a review of the land and property relations literature as well as farmland and agricultural change in Ontario. We then briefly review agroecological issues and concepts that are important for linking on-farm agroecological health to aformentioned farmland and agricultural changes. From here, we use survey, interview and soil sample data collected from grain farmers across Ontario to elucidate relatively new shifts in land tenure and use dynamics. We argue that this complex set of forces is interacting to produce an appealing set of conditions for financial investors, while restricting access to farmland for less-capitalized farmers. We then show how these shifts are divesting capital and attention from agroecological health. We conclude with a reflection on how the state has been mediating and contributing to these dynamics, and urgently call for land policy that prioritizes social and ecological principals.