The Rentierization of Food: Regimes of Property and the Making of Chile’s Globalized Agriculture

Seminar in Critical Development Studies hosted by Cornell Global Development and the Graduate Field of Development Sociology

Abstract:

A common trend within major contributions to the debate on the financialization has consisted of giving analytical priority to processes of market-making over institutional regimes of property. This article shifts the gaze towards the latter in order to suggest that global agrarian change under neoliberalism is more an outcome of rentierization than it is of financialization. By considering rent as a class relation that relies on monopoly ownership or control of the circuit of capital, the article shows that crucial elements of agrarian value chains have come to be strongly characterized by rentier dynamics. To illustrate the concrete historical manifestation of the process of rentierization, this article explores the case of Chile’s neoliberalizing and export-oriented agricultural economy. As a result of wide-ranging reforms in the governance of land, ports, water, logistical infrastructure, intellectual property, pensions, and capital markets, Chile’s agro-food system is illustrative of a burgeoning mutation of class power that has placed property owners at the center of the dynamics of wealth creation under late capitalism.

About the speaker: 

Martín Arboleda is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. His research explores the role that primary commodity production performs in the political economy of global capitalism. His fields of interest include global political economy, critical social theory, and agrarian studies. He is the author of the book Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (Verso, 2020), as well as of Gobernar la utopía: sobre la planificación y el poder popular (Caja Negra Editora, 2021). His research has been published in scholarly journals such as Geoforum, Journal of Agrarian Change, Antipode, and Society & Space, as well as in non-academic outlets such as Jacobin Magazine, Jacobin América Latina, and Harvard Design Magazine, among others. He is currently working on a long-term research project on the political economy of the globalized food system, as well as on the social and political history of economic planning in Latin America.