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Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado

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  • Andrew L. Ofstehage

Abstract

This article describes the financialization of work, value, and social organization in a transnational community of soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. This community originally migrated from the US Midwest to the Brazilian Cerrado in search of large tracts of cheap and productive land. While these farmers migrated to Brazil in pursuit of the reproduction of farming livelihoods and values, they adopted new forms of work, new values of farming, and new social organization on the farm. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic research on two transnational soy†farming communities in Brazil, this article analyzes the operations of capital and the emergence of financialized farming. US family farmers purchased massive tracts of Brazilian farmland for soy production, often financed by neighboring farmer†investors, and transitioned from mid†scale farmers to large†scale farm managers. This transition entailed a shift in forms of work from the field to the office and a corporatization of the farm decision†making process, shifting from family centered to investor centered. Consequently, farmers placed less value on traditional measures of a good farmer, such as yield, and greater value on financialized measures of a good farmer, including return on investment, land acquisition, and accounting practices. This research supports the framework of financialization as a situated process that emerges out of practice and reworks economic and social organization.

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  • Andrew L. Ofstehage, 2018. "Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 274-285, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:5:y:2018:i:2:p:274-285
    DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12123
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Lapegna, Pablo, 2016. "Soybeans and Power: Genetically Modified Crops, Environmental Politics, and Social Movements in Argentina," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780190215149.
    2. Eduardo Gudynas, 2008. "The New Bonfire of Vanities: Soybean cultivation and globalization in South America," Development, Palgrave Macmillan;Society for International Deveopment, vol. 51(4), pages 512-518, December.
    3. André Magnan, 2012. "New avenues of farm corporatization in the prairie grains sector: farm family entrepreneurs and the case of One Earth Farms," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 29(2), pages 161-175, June.
    4. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015. "The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 10581.
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    Cited by:

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    5. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103433, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

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