Private Equity’s Growing Control Over Agriculture: Ominous

From seven agriculture-focused funds in 2004 to more than 300 today, the interest in capturing profits from farming and agribusiness on a global scale is growing. Most of these funds are “private equity” funds (that are not listed on stock exchanges) with a total aggregate capital raised of US$8.4 billion in 2019. A recent report by GRAIN examines the issue, Private equity is only one class of investors taking control of assets in the food and agriculture sphere – from farmland to grain terminals to meat processing plants to food delivery – and transforming realities for farmers, fishers and workers. But it is a powerful class, becoming increasingly present in the global South, with much of the funds landing in Africa.
Nearly half the money engaged in private equity as a whole (46%), and agriculture and farmland investing specifically (44%), comes from worker pension funds. This points to a potentially huge accountability gap, as there is a lack of transparency around these investments which are not necessarily being managed in the interests of workers or the local communities where capital is being deployed.
The private equity industry is subject to very little regulation or oversight, which is a central part of its appeal to investors (and why it is often anchored offshore). Apart from lax requirements on reporting and disclosure, excessively aloof tax treatment is a huge issue. When it comes to political or societal accountability, there is next to none.
This trend is part of broader process by which the world of finance – banks, funds, insurance companies and the like – is gaining control over the real economy, including forests, watersheds and rural people’s territories. This is called financialisation. Apart from uprooting communities and grabbing resources to entrench an industrial and export-oriented model of agriculture, it is shifting power to remote board rooms occupied by people with no connection to farming, much less local concerns, and who are merely in it to make money.
It is disconcerting that the biggest players in the private equity industry are people’s pension funds, followed by governments’ development finance institutions. They are responsible, yet there is zero connection between them and the people whose money they are investing, much less between them and the communities impacted by these investments. With the world grappling with a Covid-triggered economic crisis and an escalating climate crisis, we have to put the question of how to better support people’s retirements, and how to dismantle, not entrench, the industrial food system, on the table.
https://www.grain.org/en/article/6533-barbarians-at-the-barn-private-equity-sinks-its-teeth-into-agriculture
– Third World Network