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Ouma, Stefan (2020)Newcastle: Agenda Publishing/Columbia University Press.EXTRACT“6. Value(s): Why has the road to “greener pastures” been so dumpy?In this chapter, I provide novel insights into the moral grounds on which the legitimacy of capital placements into the world of farming are negotiated. This effort is connected to the critical projects of other scholars who have called for an unpacking of the concrete operations of capital, “in particular material configurations, shedding light on processes of valorisation as well as on the frictions and tensions of conventions crossing them in lived and grounded circumstances” (Mezzadra &#38; Neilson 2015: 6; see also Braun 2016; Vogl 2015). We can specify the preconditions for finance capital’s operations and their resulting footprints, however, only if we understand the moral fabric that holds these together. This, again, requires abandoning the ontological divide between the “economic” and the “moral” – between “value" and “values” – that is as much a part of popular discourse as it is of neoclassical economics. It risks reifying the popular conception of finance as an autonomous sphere that colonizes the lifeworld but is out of reach for most of us. This distinction is often drawn by the finance industry and its critics alike. Although money managers argue that they are, first of all, committed to satisfying investors because of their fiduciary duty (and thereby relegate criticism to the realm of the “political”, “social” or “moral”), critics often accuse finance of economizing something that should not be economized – at least, not according to a financial market frame of worth. In contrast, I show here that assetization is itself firmly entangled with culture, morals and values. Acknowledging this is pivotal for better understanding what goes on inside the agri-investment chain, and on/in the “assets” incorporated into these.”