Poverty finance and the durable contradictions of colonial capitalism: Placing ‘financial inclusion’ in the long run in Ghana

Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

“…As agrarian households have become more deeply integrated into global financial markets, geographers and others have since developed this conceptual approach in order to analyze the political ecology of debt. They have documented how farmer debt has contributed to soil degradation (Bernards, 2021; Walsh-Dilley, 2020), loss of agro-diversity (Green, 2020a; Li, 2014a), groundwater depletion (Taylor, 2013), deforestation (Tubbeh and Zimmerer, 2019), and socio-ecological vulnerability more generally (Ramprasad, 2019). A primary conclusion from this literature is that the relation between debt and agro-ecology is contingent upon what Li (2014a) calls the wider “conjuncture” of agrarian change.…”

“…Three emerging trends in the literature illustrate this point. First, agrarian financial markets are influenced by, and intersect with, pre-existing relations of credit and debt, which are often built on underlying class, caste, race, and gender hierarchies (Bernards, 2021; Green, 2020a; Ouma, 2020; Taylor, 2011). For example, prior credit markets established by colonial states, which often exploited racial and class tensions in the countryside, continue to shape financial markets today.…”

“…For instance, many agrarian households borrow to finance their social reproduction, or juggle credit to stay solvent in the face of rising indebtedness. This is not to say that the boundary between household production and reproduction is clearly defined, as indeed it rarely is (Bernards, 2021; Green, 2020a), but that smallholder financial ecologies are likely to encompass multiple sources of credit and extend beyond rural spaces alone. Indeed, it is precisely this social and geographical complexity of smallholder financial ecologies that new digital financial technologies in value-chain agriculture seek to simplify in order to manage the production process more efficiently for capital.…”

“…To do so, I critically analyze scholarship in political ecology and development geography related to agrarian finance, noting connections to wider interdisciplinary work within agrarian studies and economic anthropology. Political ecologists have examined household debt in terms of the capitalist relations of agricultural production (Bernards, 2021; Green, 2020a; Li, 2014a; Taylor, 2013; Walsh-Dilley, 2020). Influenced by agrarian Marxism, this research has demonstrated that agrarian finance is co-constitutive of processes like commodification, property formalization, and land dispossession.…”

“…The first is research about neoliberal projects of financial inclusion that have integrated smallholder agriculturalists into global financial markets. This research focuses primarily on household credit and debt in the context of agrarian transformations and financial technologies, such as microcredit and agricultural insurance (e.g., Bernards, 2021;Green, 2020aGreen, , 2020bIsakson, 2015;Johnson, 2013;Ramprasad, 2019;Taylor, 2011Taylor, , 2013. A second, related theme deals with the growing financial investment in farmland, whereby large, international investors have purchased vast tracts of land, often dispossessing prior inhabitants and altering land uses (e.g., Fairbairn, 2014Fairbairn, , 2020Knuth, 2015;Le Billon and Sommerville, 2017;Ouma, 2016Ouma, , 2020.…”