Financialization, land prices and land grab: a study based on the Brazilian reality
Abstract
Abstract In the last years, the term “land grab” has gained international importance and has been used as a catch-all frase for (trans)national commercial land transactions mainly revolving around the production and export of food, animal feed, biofuels, timber and minerals. The main literature explains it as a consequence of the financialization process that included land as an asset. Our main proposition in this article is that for Brazil, speculative land acquisitions played an important role in the portfolio of many economical agents, but with the deregulation of financial markets and the financialization of the seventies it became more intensive. To do so, first we present the different theoretical approaches to the land grab phenomenon and add a post-keynesian view on land transactions to the debate. Second, we analyze the available data on agriculture and livestock foreign investments in Latin America with the main focus on Brazil. Third, we present the legal and institutional aspects of foreign-owned land in Brazil. In conclusion, we propose that land grabbing will always have a speculative component, but after the deregulation of financial markets, the pressure for land acquisition is larger and the efforts in regulation and control over land acquisition in Brazil have not been effective in controlling acquisitions by foreigners.
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