This article brings to light one aspect of alternative agri-food practices by exploring the values and meanings domestic food producers associate with their actions, thereby making a small contribution to increasing understanding of the act of urban backyard food production. While Australian backyards have long been productive spaces, there has been little examination of this phenomenon in the Australian context. Limited quantitative data give some insight into the extent of domestic production, and while there is an increasing interest in certain aspects of the local food system, including community gardens and farmers markets, there is a dearth of literature that explores the contemporary act of domestic production. This work seeks to situate the act of domestic production within the broader movement calling for change within the global food system, particularly that being articulated by the food sovereignty movement. Drawing on Gibson–Graham's diverse economies framework, and through interviews with eight domestic food producers in one Australian city, this work finds that the act of growing food at home offers space for hope – where small acts can be seen as part of the broader food sovereignty movement seeking to remake our food system.

In their highly influential teaching and research text Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience Fagan and Webber set out a substantivist, institutionalist and multi-scalar account of the Australian space economy’s relatively rapid and radical globalisation after 1980. This paper extends Fagan and Webber’s global restructuring thesis to Australian farming and agriculture, connecting historical and more recent scholarship on agriculture–finance relations. We highlight two areas where finance has fundamentally reshaped the agricultural sector. First, we argue that financial restructuring has shifted the relationship between farmers and lenders. Second, we suggest that under the logics of finance, Australian land and water are emerging as ‘alternative’ financial asset classes. The paper demonstrates that Australian agriculture has become subject to a comprehensive process of finance-driven economic restructuring over recent decades. Regulatory changes since the 1980s have resulted in an agricultural sector where finance’s growing role is normalised as a part of the sector’s operation. Importantly, we stress the paramount role governments have played in redefining agri-finance relationships in Australia by promoting and providing the regulatory framework for processes of marketisation and assetisation, thereby making agriculture attractive to subsequent financial investments. Finance does not operate on its own but relies on the state’s crucial role in incentivising and setting the conditions for finance capital.

Recent years have seen a flood of pseudo-facts and falsely precise data on land deals. This has led some to call for a more careful approach to the study of land deals that moves away from the current hectare-centric focus towards a grounded case-study methodology. Heeding such calls, this contribution draws on fieldwork undertaken in Mali during 2011 to examine a well-known land deal, the Malibya project, which involved a contract for the transfer of control of 100,000 hectares of land within the Office du Niger. Locally and globally, the deal was denounced following the destruction of homes and gardens as a result of a canal development associated with project. In contrast, the Malian government has argued such projects are vital for expanded irrigation infrastructure and thus securing food self-sufficiency for Mali. Somewhere in between are the farmers of the Office du Niger, some of whom argue for the cessation of the project and others of whom argue the expansion of irrigation in the zone could benefit farmers, particularly those without sufficient access to land. This paper explores the differing viewpoints of the actors involved and the role the land-grabbing frame has played in mobilising these different responses.