Fictions of Safety

This chapter explores the flipside of public land disposal, turning to the financial dynamics that have led institutional investors to aggressively incorporate rural farmland, long-term commercial leases, surplus public land inventories, and other low-rent-yielding properties into their portfolios, thereby transforming land into a fungible global asset. It investigates how shocks in asset prices in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis led investors to mobilize defensive understandings of land. In contrast to the more commonly studied speculative storylines of closing rent and yield gaps, the chapter exposes how the narration of land as a “safe” asset is significant in shaping patterns of global land investment, banking the stability of financial markets on social presumptions of land's countercyclicality and capacity to retain value. While these performative storylines build on historical patterns and statistical pictures, the fiction of safety that they collectively enact also fuels fresh risk taking, putting land to use in ways more tightly attuned to the logics and cycles of international finance and thereby undermining the fixity of the ground itself. Ultimately, the chapter aims to shed light on the financial sector not only as a key driver of global land and property transformations but one whose defensive strategies continue to shape US security in divergent ways.