The process of acquisition of large extensions of land by foreign investors (transnational corporations, foreign governments, and individual investors) has intensified in the past decade in Argentina. The expansion of ownership of the land by transnational capital in these countries, with the explicit support of their governments, has generated a series of socio-environmental conflicts due to evictions, enclosures of public spaces, forest clearances, etc. Based on a corporate intelligence method, this article attempts to answer the following questions: What were the main mechanisms through which foreign investors acquired land in the country, and what role did the state play in making this possible?

Financialization is one of the most relevant processes embedded in the functioning and evolution of the contemporary capitalist model and presents differential characteristics in the peripheral economies of the world-system. In turn, land grabbing is also one of the most relevant phenomena taking place in the field of farmland and land use, with particular significance also within the Global South. After presenting an in-depth analysis of both phenomena for Latin America, we specifically study the case of the two Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) where land grabbing has a greater qualitative and quantitative importance. In our article, we analyze the main interrelationships between both processes and show how financialization has played a fundamental role (together with the policies designed and the de-regulations implemented by respective states, and the participation of other domestic actors) in the land grabbing process in both countries.

Land grabbing by foreigners may be seen as the transfer of value from countries of the periphery to the countries of the center. China is one of the principal countries acquiring land in Latin America, and Argentina and Colombia are the main countries in which its investment is concentrated. The explicit objective of Chinese investment in land there is, in addition to the pursuit of profits in both food production and land value, acquiring a guaranteed supply of cheap food to sustain its low industrial wages and of Chinese manufactures to maintain its competitiveness at the international level. This makes this investment of crucial interest because it allows us to understand the dependent character of the development measures that are being employed in those Latin American countries despite their different ideological orientations. Se puede considerar el acaparamiento de tierras por extranjeros como la transferencia de valor de países de la periferia a países del centro. La China es uno de los principales países que adquiere tierra en América Latina, y su inversión se concentra mayormente en Argentina y Colombia. El objetivo explícito de la inversión china en tierras allí es, además de la búsqueda de ganancias en producción de comestibles y valor del suelo, adquirir un suministro garantizado de comestibles baratos para sostener sus bajos sueldos industriales y para que la manufactura china mantenga su competitividad a nivel internacional. Por eso, esta inversión es de crucial interés porque nos permite comprender el carácter dependiente de las medidas de desarrollo que se emplean en esos países latinoamericanos a pesar de sus distintas orientaciones ideológicas.

This paper argues that dependent countries are affected by the phenomenon of land grabbing, and that the major investors acquiring land come from countries of the “center.” The phenomenon thus has two effects in terms of worldwide production specialization: (1) a “vertical” effect of bringing about greater differentiation between the traditional countries of the “center” and dependent countries, where the latter focus their development policies on deepening their foreignized and primarized productive structures; and (2) a “horizontal” effect, through which states such as China and the Arab countries, which are developing countries in terms of their productive structure, are differentiated from the rest of the dependent countries in terms of their capacity to export capital.

In recent years, land grabbing has become widespread in Latin America, following similar trends in Africa. Multilateral agencies have sought to explain this phenomenon by arguing that these investments in land are driven by the rich endowments of natural resources of the countries in the region. This article argues that this explanation is insufficient: the rich endowment of natural resources in Latin America cannot explain the rising transfer of land to foreign investors, as if it were a natural curse. By contrast, the deepening of development models based almost exclusively on the exploitation of these resources seems to be the key, such that the role of states becomes essential to the explanation. In fact, the emergence of many self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ governments in the region has not reversed the established structural dependency, based on an extractivist development model, but has deepened it.

The government that took office in Argentina in December 2015 shaped a mode of development oriented toward finance and extractivism, trade and capital liberalization, and austerity policies. One of the main goals was to reduce the fiscal deficit and to lower domestic production costs in order to increase international competitiveness. Many measures implemented, such as the pension reform of 2017, budget cuts in gender-sensitive areas, and the change in the nature of social policies, had a differential impact on women and LGBT people when compared to men. However, beyond the measures taken by a particular government, the characteristics of extractivism and land concentration are structural dimensions with profound biases in their impacts in terms of gender.