Flex crops neverland: finding access to large-scale land investments?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores a neglected aspect of the financialization of land grabbing. Whereas financialization is a multifaceted phenomenon, a straightforward link has been established between financialization and land grabbing. On the one hand, market-oriented views claim that large-scale land investments benefit both the agrifood industry and small-scale farmers. On the other hand, structuralist scholarship explains how financialization creates new ways to accumulate profits by dispossessing small-scale farmers. We build on the call for a more nuanced account of large-scale land investments’ impact on land access by considering the crops involved. While finance’s attraction for flex crops has already been touched upon, we reverse the perspective by exploring whether flex crops influence the way financialization in agriculture unfolds in three areas: megamergers, contract farming, and land commodification. Building on Allaire’s concept of quality, we argue that flex crops can exacerbate unequal power relations and limit access to land for small-scale farmers.

KEYWORDS:

• Financialization
• flex crops
• land grabbing
• quality
• biofuels

Acknowledgements

The author would like to warmly thank Prof. Jennifer Clapp, Prof. Jean-Christophe Graz, Prof. Eric Helleiner, Prof. Derek Hall, and Prof. Harriet Friedmann for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their valuable inputs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Christelle Genoud http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0888-4926

Notes

1. Land grabbing, land rush, land deals, large-scale land acquisitions, loss of land control, land transactions, and land investment – there is no unanimity in the academic literature on a concept comprehensively defining this evolving phenomenon, one that covers a myriad of different situations, processes, and actors (Oya, 2013). Here, we use a broad definition of land grabbing as the:

Capturing control of relatively vast tracts of land and other natural resources through a variety of mechanisms that involve large-scale capital that often shifts resource use orientation into extractive character, whether for international or domestic purposes, as capital’s response to the convergence of food, energy and financial crises, climate change mitigation imperatives, and demands for resources from newer hubs of global capital. (Borras, Franco, Gómez, Kay, & Spoor, 2012, p. 851)

2. See for example Margulis, McKeon, & Borras (2013) and White, Borras, Hall, Scoones, & Wolford (2012).

3. In this paper, we use the term ‘biofuel’ because of its dominance in the literature. However, this term is problematic when we think of these fuels as if they ‘represented life, as opposed to competition for scarce crop land, de-forestation, and so on’ (Mcmichael, 2009b, p. 283, quoted in Gillon, 2010, p. 723). Some authors choose to use the term ‘agrofuel’ in order to ‘distinguish highly capitalized, large-scale, first generation biofuel projects for export, rather than small-scale projects in which fuel products are processed and destined for local end-users’ (Nalepa & Bauer, 2012, p. 403). When quoting those authors, we follow this choice.

4. While some of the paper’s analysis may apply to a broader category of farmers, our focus here is on small-scale farmers. Indeed, development policies promoting farmers’ access to the market and the critical literature on the financialization of agriculture are mainly concerned with this type of farmers. Here, we understand ‘small-scale farmer’ in the same sense as Akram-Lodhi and Kay’s definition of peasant: ‘[…] an agricultural worker whose livelihood is based primarily on having access to land that is either owned or rented, and who uses principally their own labour and the labour of other family members to work that land’ (Akram-Lodhi & Kay, 2009, p. 3).

5. See for example Anseeuw, Boche, et al. (2012), Anseeuw, Wily, Cotula, and Taylor (2012), Cotula (2012), Deninger et al. (2010), and Zoomers (2010).

6. The Guardian website: ‘ChemChina Makes $ 43bn Offer for Swiss Pesticide Firm Syngenta’ written by Farrell, Sean in 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/03/chemchina-makes-43bn-dollar-offer-for-swiss-pesticide-firm-syngenta (accessed March 2018).

7. Acronym referring to the four dominant commodities traders of grain: Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus.

8. Wilmar International website: ‘Manufacturing Tropical Oils Products’ http://www.wilmar-international.com/our-business/tropical-oils/manufacturing/tropical-oils-products/ (accessed January 2018).

9. Wilmar International website: ‘Integrated Business Model’ http://www.wilmar-international.com/our-business/integrated-business-model/ (accessed December 2016).

10. Cargill website: ‘Smallholder program’ https://www.cargill.com/sustainability/palm-oil/palm-smallholder-programs (accessed March 2018); Unilever website: ‘Livelihoods for smallholder farmer’ https://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/enhancing-livelihoods/inclusive-business/livelihoods-for-smallholder-farmers/ (accessed January 2018); Wilmar International website: ‘Smallholders’ http://www.wilmar-international.com/sustainability/smallholders/ (accessed January 2018).

11. ADM also benefited from flexibility through state subsidies at three different levels, concentrating the largest amounts of federal subsidy in its hands (Carney, 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christelle Genoud

Notes on contributor

Christelle Genoud is PhD candidate at the University of Lausanne and Associate Expert in Human Rights at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). In 2016 and 2017, she has been a visiting scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada and at the los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia. Her research is on the relationship between finance and human rights. She focuses on the financialization of agriculture, with a case study on the production of palm oil in Colombia.