The rentierization of food: regimes of property and the making of Chile’s globalized agriculture

ABSTRACT

Current scholarly debates on the financialization of agriculture have tended to give analytical priority to markets over institutional regimes of property. This article shifts the gaze towards the latter in order to illustrate the extent to which globalized food systems have come to be increasingly characterized by rentier dynamics. By considering rent as a relation that relies on monopoly control of the circuit of capital, the article explores the case of Chile as an instance of a broader mutation of class power that has placed property owners increasingly at the center of the dynamics of wealth creation under late capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Rent
• circuits of capital
• financialization
• logistics revolution
• global commodity chains

Acknowledgements

This article benefitted from the comments and constructive criticism of three anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Peasant Studies, as well as by the editorial work of Saturnino Borras. Preliminary versions of this article were presented at the Annual Conference of the Chilean Network for Science and Technology Studies (CTS-Chile), at the Critical Development Studies Seminar, Cornell University, and at Queen Mary, University of London.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The legal amount that AFPs can invest abroad has been progressively increased since the 1990s and now stands at 80 per cent for the riskier asset classes; the actual level is now above 40 per cent.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper has been funded by the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies (CIIR), FONDAP Number 11140083, as well as by Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development, ANID (grant 11180099).

Notes on contributors

Martín Arboleda

Martín Arboleda is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. His fields of interest include global political economy, critical social theory, and agrarian studies. He is the author of the books Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020), and of Gobernar la utopía: sobre la planificación y el poder popular (Caja Negra Editora, 2021), as well as of several scholarly articles. He is currently working on a long-term research project on the political economy of the globalized food system, as well as on the social and political history of economic planning in Latin America.

Thomas F. Purcell

Thomas F. Purcell is Lecturer in International Political Economy at King’s College London, Department of European and International Studies. His research covers the political economy of development in Latin America; the relationship between value and rent in global agricultural commodity chains; the ‘financialisation’ of cities and urban infrastructure; and economic and political crisis in Spain and the Eurozone’s periphery. Along with several scholarly articles he is co-author of The Limits to Capital in Spain (2014), published in Palgrave's International Political Economy series.