Work on global food systems has focused on the livelihoods of farmers directly affected as growers of agricultural export goods and has paid less attention to those who are left behind by new patterns of production and consumption. The connections between preexisting agricultural livelihoods and the new systems of provision associated with fashionable products are poorly understood. Global trends in food culture have wide ranging local impacts. In this paper we argue that researchers need to look beyond linear commodity chains and the goods that travel from producers in one country to consumers in another and expand global food systems analysis to understand what regional livelihoods are modified or displaced by globalised agriculture. Avocados are a popular health food among millennials. Colombia is experiencing a boom in exports. Avocados have long been grown in the Santander region, but global demand has turned them into a politically important crop. Using food systems analysis, our field research illuminates how new opportunities for capital accumulation are transmitted through global markets and shape regional agricultural practices. Large investors have profited, while small-scale farmers have been impoverished. We demonstrate how the interplay of requirements for homogenous fruit from local supermarkets, demand for the export Haas variety, as well as the government's export-oriented policies, have modified local livelihoods. Our contribution examines the broader social space in which agriculture is located. We argue for the need to study food systems beyond the vertical relations that constitute linear supply chains and examine the horizontal context of systems of provision.

This article considers how financial mechanisms shape political and economic power around farmland. It draws on political ecology around the financialization of agriculture, and perspectives from Science and Technology Studies about performativity and topology to study how financial mechanisms in agriculture reconfigure networks of access to farmland for farmers, investors, workers and consumers. The article focuses on the case of Farmland Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States and shows REITS as sociotechnical assemblages of economic theories mobilized by investors and their representatives. Building on topologic ideas, the article highlights how financial mechanisms, such as REITs, shift networks of access to land. These mechanisms can profoundly shape landscapes and livelihoods by creating a market for farmland that transforms the connections of different actors with land, distancing workers and consumers from decision making processes while producing fluid and smooth access for investors. By studying REITs from the perspectives of economization and topology this article identifies key actors and mechanisms through which financialization is reconfiguring access to farmland and identifies limitations and opportunities for increased access to decisions about land for farmers, workers and consumers.Keywords: financialization of agriculture, political ecology, performativity, topology, science and technology studies, REITs, farmland

In this paper, I argue that the cumulative effects of coercive and indirect labour discipline enable firms to reorganize production. Through a historical analysis of the palm oil industry in northeastern Colombia, I identify changing forms of value chain governance in relation to transformations in labour control regimes. The combined effects of multiple labour control strategies have weakened labour power and workers' overall possibilities to shape value chain governance. In this case, labour coercion directly diminished workers' associational power and enabled labour flexibilization in the industry, limiting workers' structural power. A dialogue between the Global Value Chains framework and Critical Agrarian Studies, with a focus on labour regimes, highlights that labour flexibilization can build on past instances of coercive control to transform the structure of a value chain. This research illustrates that coercion is not necessarily “extra‐economic” but is often intrinsic to the organization of the global economy.