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Preface

This book seeks to unpack a large-scale phenomenon that has sparked a lively debate in the media, among scholars and in activist circles since 2008: the increasing interest of finance capital in all things agricultural, particularly in farmland and farming ventures. My aim in writing has been to enable non-specialist readers to delve into a subject that is often marred with technical jargon and social complexity. Finance and, by implication, how other people’s money is managed are topics too important to be left to specialists, whether they are academics or the finance professionals themselves. “Finance-gone-farming” offers a unique opportunity to study the emergence, evolution and production of a new social space – or “asset class” – through which money is used to create more money on behalf of the “better off” parts of the world, which are able to participate in capital markets. But its study also calls for historical depth, as modern finance has a much longer history in the remaking of agricultural landscapes than is often acknowledged in existing debates.

What follows has a broad interdisciplinary outlook, speaking to debates in geography, heterodox economics, sociology, anthropology, the social study of finance, agrarian studies and political ecology. Although there is a growing literature on the financialization of food and agriculture, none boasts the empirical grounding and unique field access (down to the level of invested farms) that I have negotiated over seven years of global network building. This book will also be of interest to scholars committed to opening the “black box” of investment chains and the asset/wealth management industry, as well as to those who have attempted to develop more practice-oriented understandings of “financialization” and its social and ecological consequences.

Previous work loosely informing this book is listed in the reference list. Chapter 6 in particular draws heavily on parts of that work (Ouma 2020).

A last technical remark. To ensure anonymity, I have changed the names of certain protagonists, withheld the sources of some quotes and slightly altered certain quotes. In all cases, an asterisk is used to indicate this.