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

Andrew L. Ofstehage

Economic Anthropology, 2018, vol. 5, issue 2, 274-285

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.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12123

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:5:y:2018:i:2:p:274-285

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-4847

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Anthropology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().