Running out of farmland? Investment discourses, unstable land values and the sluggishness of asset making

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• 作者：Oane Visser
• 关键词：Farmland ; Investment ; Value ; Financialization ; Commoditization ; Natural resources ; Finance ; Asset ; Land grab ; Russia ; Ukraine
• 刊名：Agriculture and Human Values
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：March 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：34
• 期：1
• 页码：185-198
• 全文大小：909KB
• 刊物主题：Ethics; Agricultural Economics; Veterinary Medicine/Veterinary Science; History, general; Evolutionary Biology;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1572-8366
• 卷排序：34

文摘

This article critically analyzes the assumption that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that, therefore, farmland values are bound to rise across the globe. It investigates the process of land value creation, as well as its flipside: value erosion and stagnation, looking at the various mechanisms involved in each. As such, it is a study of how the financialization of agriculture affects the process of land commoditization. I show that, for farmland to be turned into an asset, a whole range of conditions have to be fulfilled, presenting a typology of asset making in the context of farmland. Asset making, like commoditization, is a process of assemblage, and it is less straightforward and less stable than generally assumed. Further, I argue that ‘asset making’ is not a one-way process. The article is based on an analysis of global data on land values and the case of farmland investment in post-Soviet farmland (Russia and Ukraine).