When Land Meets Finance in Latin America: Some Intersections between Financialization and Land Grabbing in Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

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.

Agrarian extractivism: Addressing actors and their agency at the national level

“…Another group (Bair, 2005; Sly, 2017) use the world‐system approach to link the macroeconomic system and local consequences. Garcia‐Arias et al (2021) study extractivism as an expression of neoliberal financialization, deriving in land grabbing by emerging economies such as China that, after the 2008 crisis, switched their food‐security strategy from international trade to the production of food outside their territories. All these authors focus on the global causality of the phenomenon, with the underlying notion that without changing the capitalist global picture, there is little possibility of affecting the drivers of economic exchange between nations.…”