Agri-investment Cashing in on COVID-19

Abstract

Global agri-food relationships are continuously changing. However, some periods can be perceived as critical moments when sudden events challenge established patterns and introduce new dynamics within the agri-food system. Many observers identified the food price hikes in 2007/2008 as such a “turning point”. The food price hikes were seen as a stark reminder of the fragility and volatility of the global food system and interpreted as signalling a structural crisis in agriculture and its organizational and institutional frameworks. The 2008 crisis produced both winners and losers. Among the winners were institutional investors that started engaging much more actively in the area of productive resources. Roughly ten years later, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global agri-food relationships again, perhaps even more profoundly. This chapter juxtaposes the crises of 2007/2008 and 2020/2021 and explores the role of financial actors within them. It analyses how financial investors, who emerged as powerful actors out of the 2008 crisis, responded to, and dealt with, the COVID-19 crisis. It further investigates how the pandemic has been rhetorically framed, what investment strategies were promoted, and how financial investors anticipate their engagement with agri-food in (post-)pandemic times.

Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’: the interplay of imaginaries, data and digital technologies within farmland assetization

“…Originally sparked by the global food price, fuel, and financial crises in 2007/08, the promotion of agri-food as a worthwhile investment opportunity has recently persisted through yet another crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, which agri-food investors have used to further strengthen the case for agri-investment (Fairbairn and Guthman 2020 ; Reisman 2021 ). While the 2007/08 conjunction of events represented the ‘initial’ crisis moment that incentivized investors to search for alternative investment possibilities, the pandemic has been touted as having consolidated agriculture as an alternative investment class (Sippel 2022 ). However, as critical scholarship on farmland investments has argued, farmland does not lend itself easily to financial investment (see, e.g., Fairbairn 2020 ; Goldstein and Yates 2017 ; Li 2014 ; Ouma 2016 , 2020a ; Pedersen and Buur 2016 ).…”