Financialising farming as a moral imperative? Renegotiating the legitimacy of land investments in Australia

Abstract

This paper investigates the debate about foreign investment in Australian farmland. Employing a moral perspective, it is argued that the apparent tensions over foreign land investments in recent years can be interpreted as a renegotiation of the legitimate grounds upon which farmland investments should take place. The analysis shows that elements of worth are being applied to farmland that go beyond the ‘pure’ treatment of land according to market principles. Most notably, national references, together with concerns about control over strategic resources and the involvement of foreign sovereign entities, have gained prominence. Reacting to these concerns, the investment of domestic superannuation capital has emerged as a moral imperative to keep farmland in ‘national hands’. The paper thus stresses the need for a more nuanced differentiation between different kinds of ‘capital’ and particularly the way they are morally evaluated. The paper furthermore reveals that the linkages between capital and ‘nature’ are not forged in a random or arbitrary way. They are crucially shaped by the societal understanding of the legitimacy of certain kinds of capital and their associated motives and intentions as part of the broader understanding about the rules and principles that should govern economic activities.

Introduction to symposium ‘Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation’

“…For example, scholars have started to unpack the intersections between farming and finance-initially often portrayed as the 'big bad wolf' hungry for farmland (Ouma 2014, p. 163)-and have argued that turning land into a financial asset class is not a smooth pathway but requires active work on land's 'investability' and is pursued by a host of actors with different interests, motivations and underlying moralities (e.g. Li 2018; Williams 2014; Ouma 2016; Kish and Fairbairn 2018;Sippel 2018). Similarly, scholars have critically investigated the role of China as another supposed 'key driver' of the land rush and have argued that Chinese investments are not as dominant and different from 'Northern' investments as is often suggested, as well as neither necessarily state-led or food security driven (Bräutigam and Zhang 2013; Oliveira 2018; Böhme 2020b).…”

Foreign investments in New Zealand’s agricultural sector and their regulation, 2001–2017

“…Its work often showed the limits of New Zealand's 'really reactive' (interview regulator 1) approach towards foreign investments in the agricultural sector, as illustrated by legal rows over the interpretation of the legislation or last-minute regulatory changes in controversial cases. This result places New Zealand next to other Anglo-Saxon countries such as Canada (Magnan, 2015;Magnan & Sunley, 2017) or Australia (Larder et al, 2015;Sippel, 2018;Sippel et al, 2017) where policymakers only imposed light regulation on foreign investors but experienced varying degrees of popular opposition. In sum, a close examination of the regulation highlights that '[w]hat counts as legal does not need to be considered legitimate by all parts of society' (Ouma, 2016;original emphasis).…”

“…The findings of the most wellstudied cases capture the diversity of approaches during the recent years of the land rush. Some states such as Australia (Larder et al, 2015;Magnan, 2015;Sippel, 2018;Sippel et al, 2017), Russia (Visser et al, 2012) and Ethiopia (Lavers, 2012) have welcomed foreign investment, while others such as Argentina (Perrone, 2013), Brazil (Fairbairn, 2015;Wilkinson et al, 2012) and Canada (Desmarais et al, 2017;Magnan, 2015;Magnan & Sunley, 2017) have followed a more cautious path.…”

Value–rent–finance

“…A recent special issue (Ouma et al, 2018: 2) captures a concern for epistemologically variegated and empirically fine-grained accounts that unpack the realisation of financial profits (M’) without losing sight of the ‘use value (C’) from which a more abstract financial value is derived’. Addressing how nature and resource-based revenues are calculated by finance, the papers shed light on the complexities, behaviours, processes and material practices that play out across socio-environmental issues like tradable permit systems (Bigger, 2018), forest-based carbon sequestering (Asiyanbi, 2018), moral judgements attached to farmland investments (Sippel, 2018) and the ‘values’ that inform the rationales of financial investors in agricultural land (Kish and Fairbairn, 2018: 585). Even though there is acknowledgement that the income of financial capital is ‘probably more accurately rents’ (Ouma et al, 2018: 501), the analytical basis of this category within Marxian political economy is eschewed, and just one of the papers concludes with a remark about ‘ground rent and land ownership concentration’ that can be included within an ‘expanded moral critique’ (Kish and Fairbairn, 2018: 585).…”