Finance Capital, Food Security Narratives and Australian Agricultural Land

Abstract

The growing involvement of financial actors in food production has been one of the major recent transformations in the global agri-food system. This 'financialization' of the agrifood sector has been observed at various levels, from commodity speculation to direct investment in agricultural production, along with farmland itself. While there has been concerted effort to track new landownership and control associated with financial actors, especially in the Global South, there has been less impetus to examine the motives of financial actors' engagement in food production and the narratives upon which such engagement is based. This paper examines the way in which a productivist food (in)security discourse is employed by financial actors to legitimate their actions and to position themselves to win public approval. We analyse two cases of agri-finance investors in the Australian context engaged in the discourse of food (in)security in relation to their agricultural investments - the Macquarie Group and Hassad Australia.