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In the last years, the term “land grab” has gained international importance and has been used as a catch-all frase for (trans)national commercial land transactions mainly revolving around the production and export of food, animal feed, biofuels, timber and minerals. The main literature explains it as a consequence of the financialization process that included land as an asset. Our main proposition in this article is that for Brazil, speculative land acquisitions played an important role in the portfolio of many economical agents, but with the deregulation of financial markets and the financialization of the seventies it became more intensive. To do so, first we present the different theoretical approaches to the land grab phenomenon and add a post-keynesian view on land transactions to the debate. Second, we analyze the available data on agriculture and livestock foreign investments in Latin America with the main focus on Brazil. Third, we present the legal and institutional aspects of foreign-owned land in Brazil. In conclusion, we propose that land grabbing will always have a speculative component, but after the deregulation of financial markets, the pressure for land acquisition is larger and the efforts in regulation and control over land acquisition in Brazil have not been effective in controlling acquisitions by foreigners.

Resumo As investigações sobre os determinantes dos preços das terras agrícolas, bem como a análise do mercado de terras, são temas recorrentes na história do pensamento econômico. Nesse sentido, o objetivo deste estudo é investigar os conceitos sobre esses determinantes e, de forma mais específica, sistematizar o pensamento econômico sobre o mercado de terras. Para tanto são resgatados os traços distintivos das escolas pré-clássica, clássica, marxista e neoclássica. Além disso, são apresentados os argumentos teóricos sobre o “paradoxo do preço da terra” e a relação da nova economia institucional com a determinação dos preços da terra. Por fim, comenta-se a contribuição de cada escola do pensamento econômico para a construção do debate teórico acerca do mercado de terras agrícolas.

Financialization is one of the most relevant processes embedded in the functioning and evolution of the contemporary capitalist model and presents differential characteristics in the peripheral economies of the world-system. In turn, land grabbing is also one of the most relevant phenomena taking place in the field of farmland and land use, with particular significance also within the Global South. After presenting an in-depth analysis of both phenomena for Latin America, we specifically study the case of the two Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) where land grabbing has a greater qualitative and quantitative importance. In our article, we analyze the main interrelationships between both processes and show how financialization has played a fundamental role (together with the policies designed and the de-regulations implemented by respective states, and the participation of other domestic actors) in the land grabbing process in both countries.

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