Ashwood et al.: What Owns the Land
In What Owns the Land: The Corporate Organization of Farmland Investment, now out in the Journal of Peasant Studies, authors Loka Ashwood (Sociology, Kentucky), John Canfield (Community & Environmental Sociology, Wisconsin), Madeleine Fairbairn (Environmental Studies, California-Santa Cruz), and Kathryn De Master (Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, California-Berkley) address corporate investment and ownership of agricultural land. Ultimately, the authors assert that corporate and other forms of land ownership can obfiscuate who actually controls what land and argue that some form of mandated public disclosure is warranted to reveal who is actually is behind these financial and other layers of land ownership by entities. By understanding the what and the who of land ownership, they argue that scholars are better equipped to understand the organizational mechanisms driving dispossession in an age of finance.
This article goes beyond the researched questions of “who” owns the land and instead addresses the “what” of land ownership, exploring the role of entities including private equity funds, publicly traded securities, and others. Considering there is no comprehensive database of landownership in the US and that deciphering ownership through tax parcel data alone is insufficient, these researchers developed a new methodology for uncovering corporate organization and actors who benefit from farmland investment through the analysis of creditors and proprietors. They perform this analysis in rural Illinois through a two-county case study.
Through this analysis, they identified absentee ownership to reveal that the who approach underestimates absentee control via corporate groups. In fact, their results indicate that internal capital markets play a central role in shaping the centralization of control and income necessary for the financialization of ownership. This structure provides these entities a way to transfer capital in ways that make the riskiest purchases possible. As a result, the authors suggest their study demonstrates that what seems to indicate ownership – a name – may obscure who or what actually makes profit from and exerts control over farmland investment.
Overall, the framework of this article demonstrates that to fully understand financial investment in farmland, one must delve below the surface of proprietors to uncover complex relationships of credit markets, debt, subsidiaries, and liability. The authors assert that the results of this study demonstrate a need for solutions that support limiting corporate ownership of farmland. They advocate for more publicly available information concerning farmland – because the current data is hidden in a way that allows investors to use corporate forms to pursue their financial goals with a surprising level of anonymity.
