When Land Meets Finance in Latin America: Some Intersections between Financialization and Land Grabbing in Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

Financialization is one of the most relevant processes embedded in the functioning and evolution of the contemporary capitalist model and presents differential characteristics in the peripheral economies of the world-system. In turn, land grabbing is also one of the most relevant phenomena taking place in the field of farmland and land use, with particular significance also within the Global South. After presenting an in-depth analysis of both phenomena for Latin America, we specifically study the case of the two Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) where land grabbing has a greater qualitative and quantitative importance. In our article, we analyze the main interrelationships between both processes and show how financialization has played a fundamental role (together with the policies designed and the de-regulations implemented by respective states, and the participation of other domestic actors) in the land grabbing process in both countries.

Agrarian extractivism: Addressing actors and their agency at the national level

“…Another group (Bair, 2005; Sly, 2017) use the world‐system approach to link the macroeconomic system and local consequences. Garcia‐Arias et al (2021) study extractivism as an expression of neoliberal financialization, deriving in land grabbing by emerging economies such as China that, after the 2008 crisis, switched their food‐security strategy from international trade to the production of food outside their territories. All these authors focus on the global causality of the phenomenon, with the underlying notion that without changing the capitalist global picture, there is little possibility of affecting the drivers of economic exchange between nations.…”

Inversiones financieras y mercado de tierras: los capitales de gran escala en el agro uruguayo

“…Este artículo se propone profundizar el estudio de las formas específicas que toma la inversión de capitales de origen financiero en el mercado de tierras a partir del caso de los capitales de gran escala en el agro del Uruguay. Se trata de un caso particularmente interesante, dado el gran dinamismo en el mercado de tierras en este país en las primeras décadas del siglo XXI, en un contexto más general en el que Sudamérica fue una de las regiones donde las inversiones en tierras tuvieron mayor despliegue (Borras Jr, Franco, Gómez, Kay y Spoor, 2012;FAO, 2014), con especial destaque para la Argentina y Brasil (Garcia-Arias et al, 2021).…”

“…Este es el contenido de lo que se conoce como financiarización, un término ambiguo que designa el proceso de creciente gravitación de actores, ganancias y lógicas financieras en el capitalismo contemporáneo. Entre sus rasgos principales, la bibliografía señala que la financiarización se manifiesta en aspectos como la búsqueda de altas ganancias en el menor plazo posible, la creciente participación de actores financieros en el paquete accionario de capitales productivos y la canalización de inversiones hacia actividades financieras antes que productivas(Ashwood et al, 2020;Garcia-Arias et al, 2021).Como parte de la economía global, la actividad agropecuaria también se imbricó con capitales que operan en los mercados financieros. Si bien esta expansión se puede rastrear, al menos, hasta la década de 1970, como resultado de la progresiva desregulación del sector financiero impulsada para resolver la crisis de rentabilidad 4 MundoAgrario, diciembre 2022-marzo 2023, vol.…”

Resisting proletarianisation in the subsistence sector: social reproduction of gendered and racialised classes of labour

“…In the Latin American countryside, historically characterised by multiple forms of production (Bernstein, 2010), the neoliberal turn in the 1980s and the commodity boom during the 2000s have contributed to the intensification of long-standing tendencies toward land concentration (Garcia-Arias et al, 2021), and especially, market and capital concentration (Vergara-Camus; Kay, 2017a). As a result, the last decades were marked by the growing loss of autonomy and increasing market dependency of small agricultural producers (Bretón et al, 2022), not only through integration to concentrated commodity chains of upstream and downstream activities but also with regard to wage labour, a growingly important source of income in rural areas.…”

“…In this same period, the simultaneous rise of social movements and the election of progressive governments in Latin America -the pink tide (Vergara-Camus, Kay, 2017b; Loureiro, 2018) -were, in a way, a response to earlier processes of dispossession and exploitation under "neoliberalism from above" 20 (Gago, 2017). Despite paying attention to the political struggle that brought together small-scale farmers, landless and landed peasants and rural workers, these governments assumed a contradictory position (Escher, 2020;Sauer et al, 2017;Guanziroli et al, 2013;Pahnke et al, 2015), managing conflicts between agribusiness and popular demands and trying to reconcile their interests under the dome of "neo-developmentalism" 21 (Vergara-Camus; Kay, 2017b;Gago, 2017;Garcia-Arias et al, 2021).…”