The radical contribution of what's in between M and M′

In recent years, land has again moved to the centre of global struggles over resources, expressed in ‘land grab’ or ‘land rush’ literature. Some (and especially early) contributions to this debate, however, have been criticized for brushing over highly divergent and sometimes contradictory place- and actor-specific constellations too hastily. It was argued that victims and benefiters were not always so clear, and that more long-term empirical research and historical depth was required. Thus, a burgeoning body of critical research has stepped in to add more nuance to the dynamics of current land transformations (for a recent discussion see Sippel and Visser, 2021). One important goal has been to unpack the intersections between finance and farming, as finance has been identified as one of the ‘bad guys’ in the land rush debate. Stefan Ouma's book is one of the first monographs that now provides a fully-fledged, comprehensive story of how ‘finance is going farming’.

With the aim of complicating the sometimes all too easily assumed alliance between finance and farmland, Ouma's starting point is to ‘get in between’ M and M′ (where M is the initial monetary investment and M′ is the investment plus a return on that investment), and see this process as an ‘operation’ that needs to be studied rather than taken for granted (Ouma, 2020: 3). This means he seeks to take a practice-oriented approach, which looks at the practicalities and conditions of financial investment and asks concretely, how does this money (M) become ‘more money’ (M′)?

Ouma's work, in the tradition of Anna Tsing’s (2005) ‘ethnography of global connections’, takes us on a journey through ‘the globe-spanning networks of modern money management’ (Ouma, 2020: ix). He does this by connecting urban financial settings with rural capital placements, tracing deterritorialized financial spaces and networks, digging deep into (settler-) colonial history, examining regulatory frameworks, exploring the values and moralities of assetization, identifying frictions within investment chains, and putting the spotlight on concrete investments in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Tanzania.

This densely composed book has many merits, but it is strongest where Ouma shows his meticulous engagement with the wealth of the contemporary and historical material and resources he collected, and the diligence with which he weaves these together to present the dense net of ‘operations’ – the manifold practical steps and conditions – that (need to) come together to produce ‘institutional landscapes’. The historical perspective he adds to this debate, which sometimes seemed to be caught up in its own ‘discourse of newness’, is particularly valuable. By excavating the historical predecessors and variants of current farmland investment, he reveals not only the long standing relationships between financial capital and land, but also their ‘mutual shaping’ within their entangled history. He notably exposes how entrenched farm-finance was within colonial endeavours, where finance was a crucial tool used to ‘transform nature into landed property, people into (enslaved) labouring subjects, and animals into livestock’ (Ouma, 2020: 43). A further key contribution is the book's take on the possibilities and limits of knowledge production on finance and its protagonists as a subject matter that, due to its intimate relationship with global elites, is among the most confidential and protected areas to research. This means that publicly available sources are limited, and – if they exist at all – usually don't provide the depth of data critical researchers are looking for. As such, these sources require substantial scrutiny, more than they often received in the land rush debate. Both issues, the (lacking of) historical depth and the (at times skewed) politics of knowledge production were major pitfalls in the land rush debate, and Ouma's book sets an example through painstakingly detailed analysis.

In addition to these crucial interventions the book makes, I have one major critique and a critical comment for further discussion. My main critique of the book again concerns knowledge production, but specifically how one both presents and positions themselves within their fieldwork. Here, Ouma's promise to ‘ground agri-investment chains in the materialities, socialities and spatialities of everyday life’ (Ouma, 2020: 10) remains largely unfulfilled. As much as the secondary data and academic sources he engages with are impressive, Ouma's own empirical material often appears more as an illustrative ‘add on’, than a thorough presentation grounded in tangible insights on the everyday worlds of his informants. This shortcoming becomes particularly evident in the last two (and main empirical) chapters, where Ouma seeks to reveal the ‘inner workings’ of the investment circle and the ‘landing of capital’ in investment sites in Tanzania and Aotearoa/New Zealand. These chapters mostly rely on eight case studies, which appear somewhat arbitrary and selective. Ouma provides little background or information as to why he chose these cases rather than others, how they are embedded in the field and stand for, and how they are connected with one another (or not). While in the other parts of the book the weaving together of the two main ‘frontiers’ (Tanzania and Aotearoa/New Zealand) works quite nicely, in these chapters the juxtaposition of cases seemingly renders them ungrounded making the narrative somewhat unclear and therefore less convincing.

Despite the framing of the empirical material as ethnographic, Ouma did not bring to life the people, nor their ‘everyday lives’ and practices as ethnographies do. When reading the book, I was longing to learn more about the people that Ouma talked with throughout his research, and have them become real and tangible people; people who might have ideals, motives, intentions, or principles in what they are doing; who might have gone into, or engage with, finance or financialized farming for particular reasons. I continuously asked myself who are they? Why and how did his informants come into these positions, and what made them believe in, and work hard to, create these new alliances between finance and farming? My own research (which I am currently preparing as a monograph) has shown that ‘who’ is doing this, out of which motivation, biographical background, and personal experience or situation is crucial to understanding why and how people pursue financial farm futures, and why they have come to consider these as desirable futures for land. For Ouma's interviewees, I want to know what were these actors’ assumptions and convictions about the world which might have inspired their beliefs? What were the personal motivations, ambitions, or goals, and the individual challenges, contradictions, or constraints they faced while they ‘went farming’? As much of the land rush literature has indeed focused on those negatively affected by the financial farming endeavours, Ouma's book missed an opportunity to give those who stand to gain from financialization a more human face.

The absence of this personal component can be extended to the author himself as well, as he never discusses his own ‘positionality’ or experiences within the book, and there is virtually no engagement with methods, nor how the fieldwork unfolded. He only claims that his research was ‘surprisingly easy’ and that the interviewees did not represent the ‘typical’ finance stereotype one might have expected (Ouma, 2020: 9–10). It is important to know, who Ouma is in this research, and how, whether, and maybe even why people talked to him – as positionality can surely affect the findings of one's research. How did he manage to make this multi-sited research – over six years, five continents, and 90 people – become ‘surprisingly easy’? What lessons can he share on ‘studying up’ to make it ‘easy’ for others doings research with financial actors? How was all this shaped and influenced by Ouma, and his positionality within the field?

My second critical comment concerns the political implications of Ouma's approach, and the political, or even radical, potential of his ‘operations’ approach. The strong political goals of the land rush debate – to alert about, and ultimately stop, land grabbing – have been both its exceptional strength as well as its doom, as the sometimes more explicit, sometimes more implicit political goals and moral underpinnings of the debate eventually watered down the conceptual strength of ‘land grabbing’ (at least within the academic debate). The land grabbing debate was rightfully criticized for ‘[creating] blind spots and conceptual black boxes’ (Pedersen and Buur, 2016: 77).

But what happens to the critique of financial capitalism if the ‘black box’ of finance going farming is opened? Does it dissolve within the chain of operations – or can the operations approach help to formulate other, maybe even radically different imaginations of the future? Ouma concludes his book with a dual outlook. The first interrogates whether finance could be used for the better, to which he responds with a somewhat ambiguous ‘no in principle’ (given the mechanisms of how financial capital unavoidably works) – ‘but still maybe’ (given its undeniable position of power). Although the ‘problematic elements’ he identifies are all important and valid, I still missed a clear critique of (financial) capitalism and its exploitative core. At various points, Ouma hints at this core issue, but he does not straightforwardly address it. Again, this is a lost opportunity to add more nuance to the political impetus of the land rush debate while not losing its foundational critique of increasing inequalities and exploitation. Lastly, Ouma flirts with ‘a bit of radical reimagination’ (Ouma, 2020: 177). Ironically, those protestors and agro-ecologists he refers to here would most likely have been among the strongest proponents of the anti-land grabbing movement. If Ouma was to present his findings to these people, what can the operations approach add to the radical reimagination of our co-existence on this planet? Can exposing what's in between M and M′ add something radical to these people's reimagining of our collective futures?