FFS - Finance and the global land rush: Understanding the growing role of investment funds in land deals and large-scale farming

Abstract

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.