Finance and the global land rush

In the wake of the 2007–08 food crisis, we have seen the combined development of a rapid financialization of agriculture with the expansion of large-scale corporate farming through large-scale land deals, in particular in developing countries and emerging economies. The rapidly growing appetite for agriculture among financial investors is driven by: mounting risks in “conventional” stocks following the financial crisis, the growing demand and prices for food, and the soaring subsidies for biofuel production. Whereas farming was long considered backward and financially uninteresting, with the new conjuncture in financial firms, a range of farmland settings are now seen as a new, promising frontier of finance. Important questions arise from these developments. What is the magnitude of the involvement of the financial sector in the farmland rush? What kind of financial actors are involved and how do they operate? How does the involvement of the financial sector change agriculture? And how viable are these investments economically? Contrary to common wisdom, which conceives these farmland investment projects as highly profitable, this article provides evidence of unprofitable and failed investment endeavours. It subsequently looks into causes of such failures, focusing on the intrinsic tensions of the investor-led farming model, and discusses implications for research and policy

State marionettes, phantom organisations or genuine movements?

Of all the rural social movements in the world, those in post-socialist Russia have been considered to be among the weakest. Nevertheless, triggered by the neo-liberal reforms in the countryside, state attention to agriculture and rising land conflicts, new social movement organisations with a strong political orientation are emerging in Russia today. This sudden burst of civil activity, however, raises questions as to how genuine and independent the emerging organisations are. Our research shows that many rural movements, agricultural associations, farm unions and rural political parties lack constituency, support the status quo and/or are actually counterfeits (what we call 'phantom movement organisations'). With this analysis, we aim to explain the nature of social movements in the post-Soviet countryside and offer an original contribution to the theory on and practice of rural social movements

Persistent farmland imaginaries: celebration of fertile soil and the recurrent ignorance of climate

This article looks at how imaginaries of land and climate play a role in farmland investment discourses and practices. Foreign farmland investors in the fertile black earth region of Russia and Ukraine have ‘celebrated’ soil fertility while largely ignoring climatic factors. The article shows a centuries-long history of outsiders coming to the region lured by the fertile soils, while grossly underestimating climate which has had disastrous implications for farm viability and the environment. Comparisons with historical and contemporary literature on other regions (e.g. the US prairies and North Africa) suggest that the underestimation of climatic risks by newcomers is remarkably prevalent in resource frontiers

Multicultural Vanguard? Sarajevo’s interethnic young adults between ethnic categorisation and international spaces

This article analyses how Sarajevo’s young adults from a middle class, interethnic background deal with the rigid ethnic categorisation enforced by state institutions and society. Their strategies (exit, reframing, and partial separation) appear to be unsatisfactory to the actors themselves, and wield generally no influence on the institutions they wish to change. Three factors have been setting into motion this dynamic: first, the difficulty of escaping ethnic group thinking when attempting to reframe ethnic categories; second, the rationality of avoiding open defiance to ethnic categorisation; and third, the young adults’ tendency to centre their life on interethnic and international spaces. As a ‘project elite’, Sarajevo’s young adults are rather separated from society, both discursively and socio-economicall

The Stock Market and the Steppe: the challenges faced by stock-market financed, Nordic farming ventures in Russia and Ukraine

Situated in the global discussion on large-scale land acquisitions, this paper examines the poor performance of Nordic owned, publicly traded, very large-scale farms (agroholdings) in Russia and Ukraine. In depth study of concrete examples of this emerging farm organization is still rare. This paper investigates the impact of the financialization of agriculture on the performance, agricultural and otherwise, of such farm companies, which is also an emerging field of inquiry. In other words, this paper seeks to go beyond discussion of “land-grabbing” and return to an older question concerning large-scale farming in developing country settings: is it even successful? In unique, exploratory research, the authors have gone “inside” these companies through interviews and attending shareholder meetings. Also, the authors have examined the discourse found in press accounts and corporate documents, the latter an underutilized source in research on corporate mega-farms. We find that finance, usually asserted as an advantage for such large-scale farms, proved in important respects to be incompatible with farming in the investigated companies, as it led to the initial prioritization of short-term speculative strategies over longer-termproduction-oriented strategies. We further find that investors initially failed to appreciate the unique climatic and other local challenges presented by agriculture, compared to other economic endeavors. Finally we note that these corporations are struggling to demonstrate economies of scale. Our results suggest that, unless conditions change, stock market financed large-scale farming companies are unlikely to play an important role in future direct food production in the region

Oligarchs, megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia

This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of Russian oligarchs in search of new frontiers, and the 2002 land code allowing land sales, land began to attract investment. Land grabbing expands at a rapid pace and in some cases, it results in dispossession and little or no compensation. This paper describes different land acquisitions strategies and argues that the share-based land rights distribution during the 1990s did not provide security of land tenure to rural dwellers. Emerging rural social movements try to form countervailing powers but with limited success. Rich land owners easily escape the implementation of new laws on controlling underutilized land, while there is a danger that they enable eviction with legal measures of rural dwellers. In this sense Russia appears to be a ‘normal’ case in the land grab debate

The re-emerging peasantry in Russia.'Peasants-against-their-own will', 'Summertime peasants'and 'Peasant-farmers'

Abstract This paper aims at conceptualising the re-emerging Russian peasantry by looking at objective characteristics (land use, production mode, and market relations) and subjective ones (peasant identity, land attachment, and cross-generational transfer of peasant culture) of the contemporary rural population, involved in individualized agricultural production. We argue that the post-Soviet transition in Russia is causing a re-emergence of the peasantry, albeit in a very fragmented manner. Three types of ‘peasants’ are being distinguished: (1) ‘peasants-against-their-own-will’, who were part of the former collective and state farms, continuing their production on subsidiary household plots; (2) ‘summertime peasants’ of urban origin, who produce on their dachas plots in the weekend and holidays; and (3) subsistence-oriented ‘peasant-farmers’. We conclude that land attachment of the post-Soviet peasantry has still a strong collective component, while peasant identity is weakly developed, as well as cross-generational transfer of peasant values. The re-peasantisation is therefore only partial, with fragmented communities, and a near-absence of social capital, which is necessary to defend rural and peasant communities in the long run

Is Russia the emerging global ‘breadbasket’?

Its rise to the top group of global wheat exporters, the abundance of abandoned land, assumed yield gaps and the apparent ‘success’ of agroholdings, have nurtured expectations of Russia becoming a global ‘breadbasket’. It is argued here that becoming a global breadbasket is hindered by substantial costs of re-cultivation abandoned land, management and financial problems of megafarms and agroholdings, lack of infrastructure for exports and increased domestic demand for feed grains, as input for the meat sector. Furthermore, as Russian wheat production is extremely volatile it might increase global price volatility, rather than contributing to global food security