"Production Grabbing": New Investors and Investment Models in Agriculture

This paper details profound agrarian restructurings related to new agricultural investment models. These models, promoted by macro-actors such as banking corporations; investment funds; asset management companies and agricultural engineering companies, often foreign to the agricultural sector, integrate the primary agricultural production within totally integrated, finance-value-chains. Macroactors oversee, control and own the entire process (supply of inputs, monitoring of the harvest, hedge and sale of the production) whereas independent farmers become "service-providers" of these institutions and in several cases do not even own the land. The paper analyses the agricultural production models being developed in South Africa, their implications for the country’s agricultural development trajectories and for the status of the independent farmer in South Africa.