Farming as Financial Asset

Reviews / Votes

How and why is global agriculture being reconfigured to serve the interests of finance capital? This book answers these questions. In a provocative, scholarly analysis Stefan Ouma draws upon his extensive research across five continents to explain and critique the 'financialization' of rural space. It is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of food and farming. -- Geoffrey Lawrence, University of Queensland A vital analysis that historically and geographically contextualizes the rush of finance into agricultural investments since 2008. Against a dominant perspective that frames this trend as emblematic of financialized capitalism and its excesses, Ouma's extensive global fieldwork affords insight into the practical operations of finance, the making of global agricultural investment chains, and the politics of these developments. -- Desiree Fields, University of California, Berkeley A tour de force ... engagingly accessible, transdisciplinary, and global in outlook. By putting land in its place - at the heart of the current economic system - this book reconnects land economics to property economics, stitching back the rural to the urban which, in turn, is linked to the national, international, and to the global. This book is neither left nor right; it is original. -- Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Society and Natural Resources