In the attached article appearing in The Counter, Joe Fassler quotes University of California, Santa Cruz sociologist Madeleine Fairbairn, in her new book Field of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush:
“Institutional investors—pension funds, university endowments, private foundations, and other organizations that manage huge pools of capital—are increasingly incorporating farmland into their investment portfolios. The same is true of those extremely wealthy people who in financial circles are euphemistically termed ‘high-net-worth individuals.’ This investor interest has spawned a host of new asset management companies eager to accommodate and encourage investors’ newfound passion for soil … managers [who] promise to shepherd investor capital safely, and often extremely profitably, into plots of farmland the world over.”
Foreign corporations are also buying up American farmland.
This is a big deal. Aspiring farmers who want to start their own farms already find farmland artificially overpriced as insolvent industrial agriculture farmers are bailed out annually by U.S. Government crop insurance subsidies.
Speculative foreign and institutional investor interest further inflates land value. Land in these investment portfolios can be farmed — but American farmers leasing the land are reduced to the status of tenant farmers. They don’t own anything.
States and the federal government need to take action to limit and stop speculator land sales. To survive our climate emergency, U.S. agriculture must transition from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture and the future will require a proliferation of regenerative small (family) farms. Many of these farmers will want to own their own land. That ability must be protected by taking action now.
Read the article here.
Photo credit: Chaim Zvi Farm Landscape/flickr CC