Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
mann and McMihael, 1989). In this instance, the threshold represents a signiicant
and services have been the principal targets of Northern investment. Both of those
sectors have been outsourced and offshored during the past quarter of a century, in
a spatialized process of labour heapening and labour disorganization. While agro-
industrialization has concentrated in the global North, producing both a heap food
regime as a complement to Northern manufacturing dominance (McMihael, 2005)
and a weapon to dispossess Southern peasants (sustaining consumerism via exploit-
ation of a seemingly endless reservoir of heap prematurely-urbanized ofshore la-
bour), it now appears to have reahed its limits of proitability. he solution is not
simply an inter-sectoral shift of capital (from manufacturing to agriculture); rather
it is replication of a similar patern to ofshore manufacturing: namely, relocating to
exploit heap inputs.
Forms of agricultural financialization
In June, 2009, the Executive Director of JP Morgan, stated: 'Physical agricul-
ture's assets are the new focus in longer term investments as institutional in-
vestors explore opportunities in everything from raw land to grain elevators to
food processing plant' (quoted in Gillam, 2009).
In Southeast Asia: 'PT Daewoo Logistics Indonesia, a subsidiary of South
Korea's Daewoo Logistics Corporation, and Cheil Jedang Samsung recently an-
nounced a partnership to invest $50 million to grow and process energy crops
on the Indonesian islands of Buru and Samba … [for export] bak to South
Korea. In early 2008, Sinopec and the Chinese National Overseas Oil Corpor-
ation, two state-owned oil giants, made investments in Indonesia of $5 billion
and $5.5 billion, respectively, to grow and process corn into biofuel to be ex-
ported to China' (Daniel, 2009, p4).
On June 5, 2008,
The New York Times
published a lead article, 'Food is
Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming', with some key statements, as follows:
• 'It's going on big time. There is considerable interest in what we call 'owning
structure' - like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farm-
land - wherever the profit picture is improving' (Brad Cole, president of Cole
