Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cross-border investing in fuel-export platforms. In the meantime, the combination of
inancialization with an enabling conjuncture ('food crisis') refocuses atention on
heap land and labour in the global South, encouraging a global 'agrofuels project',
depending on offshore production of alternative energy. Houtart (2010, p129) argues
that while 'in the case of oil and gas, public companies have taken bak their con-
trol, leaving the refining and distribution in private hands … agrofuels have entered
directly into the private sector, from the production stage'. The point about financial-
ization is that it is not simply wealthy investors like Bill Gates, James Wolfensohn,
and George Soros and other inancial interests (suh as Louis Dreyfus, Merrill Lynh,
and sovereign and pension funds) who are investing in agrofuels, but conglomerates
ancial resources to capitalize on the new fuel frontier.
In short, the agrofuels project combines a short-term (but unsustainable) atempt
to revitalize corporate proitability with the new institutional paterns of 'ofset de-
velopment', sanctioned by a political-economic elite claiming to avert energy and
climate crises by resorting to a new form of agro-imperialism. 'Offset development'
stems from the Kyoto protocol of 'clean development', whereby Northern emissions'
reduction depends on access to, and use of, Southern resources. In doing so, it re-
produces a 'global ecology' whereby nature is to be managed according to a market
calculus (Sahs, 1993). he consequences are the deepening of a North/South asym-
metry ('ecological footprint'), and the privileging of corporate management of en-
ergy resources: converting biofuels into a fungible industrial commodity at the ex-
pense of encouraging local biofuel developments for local energy sovereignty, in ac-
cordance with the needs of food sovereignty and the reproduction of biodiversity.
Notes
1
I am grateful to Hugh Campbell, Chris Rosin and Paul Stok for their helpful suggestions for im-
provement of this hapter.
2
As Merian Researh (2010, p7) reports, greenwashing claims by investors of associations with en-
vironmental NGOs are often bogus. For this reason, and reasons of legitimacy under pressure
from civil society, the development agencies are engaged in formulating (voluntary) codes of
conduct regarding land acquisition and use.
3
In explaining financialization as a conjunctural phenomenon, Arrighi argues the recent neoliber-
alization of political economy is not simply a pendulum swing away from Keynesianism, but
a consequence of last-dith eforts by the US government during the 1980s to atract capital
