Land dynamics, the expansion of agribusiness and the financialization of agriculture: towards a sociology of agrarian transformations

Abstract

The central argument in this paper rests on the idea that the current process of "modernization of agriculture" cannot be understood, as part of the literature would suggest, as an extension, intensification and deepening of the model that prevailed during the 1960s and 1970s. Nor can it be explained with the lenses, concepts and terms in use at that time and in the following years, even if updated in light ofcontemporary technological and financial innovations.  This reasoning applies both for the mechanisms triggered by interpretations that corroborate what became conventionally known as "theory of agricultural modernization" as well as for the analyses that are critical of that model, focusing instead on qualifying the modernizing process as "conservative", "forced", "painful", etc. The current model, referred to as "agribusiness", seems no longer linked to the national/regional development model, given the nature of internationalization and financialization of the enterprise. This implies a need for new analytical categories to enable understanding in the realm of the Social Sciences, and re-scales the dynamics around land appropriation.