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Grounding the financialization of farmland: perspectives on financial actors as new land owners in rural Australia

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Abstract

Sparked by the conjunction of food, fuel, and financial crises, there has been an increasing awareness in recent years of the scarce and finite character of natural resources. Productive resources such as agricultural land have been touted by financial actors—such as merchant banks, pension funds, and investment companies—as providing the basis for a range of new “alternative” financial asset classes and products. While the drivers, motives, and rationales behind the increasing interest of turning farmland into a financial asset class have been traced by a number of scholars, the interpretations of, and interactions with, financial actors at the community level have received less attention. Based on qualitative research in rural Australia, this paper reveals the grounds on which finance-backed investments have been accepted and accommodated by communities in rural Australia and delineates the reasons that have led to feelings of unease or refusal. The paper thereby demonstrates that the financialization of farmland is neither abstract nor one-sided but rather a multidimensional process that not only includes financial actors but also the impacted rural populations in various ways. Positioning the activities of financial actors in Australia within the emerging research on the financialization of farmland, the paper endorses context-sensitive analyses to better interpret these recent transformations of the agri-food system.

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Notes

  1. This paper presents context-specific insights from an international research project investigating the financialization of agriculture in Australia and further comparative contexts. It has been funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grants (Project Nos. DP 110102299 and DP 160101318).

  2. Twynam Agricultural Group is a family-owned corporation and has been a major rural land holder in Australia for the past three decades. It began divesting its agricultural land and waters holdings around 2007. The divestment included the AUD 303 million sale of water rights to the Federal Government in 2009, followed by a shift into urban and regional property and development (Kitney 2013).

  3. Clyde Agriculture is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Swire Group, a UK-based transnational corporation (John Swire and Sons Ltd. 2012). For the last 20 years, Clyde has been a major landholder of agricultural properties in Australia. Like Twynam, following the financial crisis of 2008, the Swire Group began withdrawing from the agricultural sector. According to Clyde, this decision was “based on an exceptional combination of circumstances, including high commodity prices and the best seasonal conditions seen in a decade” (Clyde Agriculture 2011–2012, n.p.). Sources in the region also suggested that the decision was related to losses the company incurred during the drought period and a desire to “realize on the company’s assets” when prices recovered.

  4. The equivalent of some 110,000 hectares; this figure was calculated using the publically available sales figures on purchases by these actors alongside data on land holdings gathered during interviews. The number of non-urban hectares used in this calculation was 996,000 hectares (Pritchard et al. 2012b, p. 338). Research further covered Hassad Australia’s land purchases in the neighbouring Narromine shire, where one property has been grouped together from what were originally four properties (two of them previously owned by corporate and two by private owners).

  5. All names used for interviewees in this paper are pseudonyms.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for their constructive comments and helpful suggestions. The research presented in this paper was part-funded by the Australian Research Council (Project Nos. DP 110102299 and DP 160101318). The fieldwork was part-funded by an LDPI small grant Dr. Sarah Ruth Sippel received from the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Emeritus Professor Lawrence was part-funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2010-330-00159) and the Norwegian Research Council (FORFOOD Project No 220691).

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  1. Centre for Area Studies, University of Leipzig, Thomaskirchhof 20, 04109, Leipzig, Germany

    Sarah Ruth Sippel

  2. Division of Geography and Planning, University of New England, Armidale, NSW, 2350, Australia

    Nicolette Larder

  3. School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia

    Geoffrey Lawrence

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Sippel, S.R., Larder, N. & Lawrence, G. Grounding the financialization of farmland: perspectives on financial actors as new land owners in rural Australia. Agric Hum Values 34, 251–265 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9707-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9707-2

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