Who rents out the land? Agrarian capital accumulation and lessor landowners in South America: The case of Uruguay

Abstract

This article studies the connections between lessor landowners, land grabbing and land financialization in contemporary capital accumulation. Drawing upon extensive empirical research conducted in Uruguay, which combined database analysis and in-depth interviews, the paper provides key insights to understand why land leasing has become a central strategy of ground rent appropriation among different types of landowners at the beginning of the 21st century. Our main results show that the leasing strategy is a combination of tenant-capitalists' expansion, social differentiation and demographic processes of the small landowning capitals displaced from production that rent out their lands, the process of land financialization through large institutional investors, which deploy a land banking strategy, and the optimization of land exploitation among landowner-capitalists. Moreover, our results highlight the importance of prioritising the study of landowners as a class in itself and the different forms of ground rent appropriation.