Financialisation and the Restructuring of Productive Forces in Agricultural Global Value Chains

In recent years, agrarian matters have made a return, following the increased frequency of climate related events and their impacts on food production and access. Those impacts have raised a critical discussion regarding the structure of the global agrifood system; which refers to the interconnected network of activities, processes, actors and institutions involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural and food products on a global scale. In particular, the structure of the global agrifood system is said to have evolved in an asymmetrical way, emphasising the inequalities along agricultural global value chains. This reconfiguration of power and profit in the agrifood system seems to take its root in the withdrawal of States from agricultural and food production in the 1980s. This reconfiguration of the agrifood system was highlighted during the 2007-2008 food price crisis: although propelled by the financial decisions and strategies of a concentrated segment of the value chain, the dramatic rise in food prices impacted smallholders --- by tightening the price squeeze --- and consumers by making staple foods impossible to afford or access. At first, this event was interpreted as an accumulation of conjonctural trends. However, alternative explanations have been raised by food regime analysis --- which provides a periodisation of the global agrifood regime based on global flows of foods and dynamics of capital accumulation. This literature suggests the challenges faced by global agriculture are linked with the features of the contemporary food regime (which began in the late 1980s). The financialisation of the global agrifood system is considered to be a core feature of the period and the root cause of contemporary trends such as land grabbing which epitomises the dispossession of smallholders for the benefits of capital accumulation. This paper argues that, although financialisation allows to shed light on crucial dynamics involving new actors and strategies, it does not sufficiently emphasise the role of labour, in particular that of Southern peasant classes and their relations to Northern agribusinesses' capital. Therefore, this paper asks: \textit{How to rethink the role of financialisation in the dynamics of the contemporary food regime ?} We argue that the recent transformations of the agrifood system reflects the expansion of capitalist agriculture and capitalist production relations to agrarian systems in new geographies, impacting their development. As such, we attempt to show the extent to which financialisation is the other side of a same coin, that has more to do with the global reorganisation of the productive forces in between Northern capital and Southern agrarian labour. To do so, we study key trends of the contemporary food regime and their underlying operations of capital (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013; Ouma, 2020). Regarding agricultural practices in the production of key crops we show how their industrialisation is a process of valorisation of food systems. Then we show how land grabbing is a complex reconfiguration of property regimes with various implications for the dispossession of smallholders. Then we analyse the financialisation of farmlands as a process of assetisation requiring the valuation and valorisation of socio-ecological systems.