TIAA, the Treadmill, and the LandGrabbing Resistance
Although due to the infamous “housing bubble,” the financial crisis of 2007–2008 implicated far more than just housing. Something that often gets overshadowed was a sub-crisis — the ‘food crisis’ — whose impacts are arguably still felt today. When the housing bubble finally burst, agricultural commodities and farmland became the next major targets for speculation, leading to a surge in prices that drove an estimated 250 million people into starvation worldwide.
These short-term effects were only the beginning. With climate change seeping deeper into our lives and food becoming an increasingly precious commodity, the trend toward buying up productive lands globally for a reliable stream of income from commodity production has only continued. The net effect is absentee landowners producing food for export; peasants and indigenous peoples in places like the Brazilian Cerrado being dispossessed of their land as prices rise; and industrial agricultural operations moving in, burning forests and polluting waters with agrochemicals. Profit, seemingly as always, is prioritized over people and the planet.
The rate of growth in this ‘sector’ is astounding. In 2013, 5-15 billion dollars was invested in farmland, and by 2015, this number doubled. Today, the financial institution known as the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA) is leading this neocolonial trend toward land grabbing. In fact, TIAA is the world’s largest landholder, now holding some 3 million acres of land worth over $10 billion all on its own.
This case of landholding is unlawful for several different reasons. TIAA uses a complex structure of subsidiaries to buy land internationally and circumvent laws limiting how much land can be owned foreignly. Furthermore, their investments in farmland lack any meaningful transparency, and an investigation has linked many of their (or their subsidiary’s) farms specifically to deforestation and forest fires, as well as conflict with locals. Afro-Brazilian activist Altamiran Ribeiro, one of many activists working internationally to build pressure against TIAA, accuses their soybean operations in Brazil of using security guards and death threats to further intimidate dispossessed villagers. All the while, TIAA and their partner company Nuveen continually claim to be socially responsible investors.
How did we get here?
TIAA’s propensity to prioritize profit at the expense of all else is arguably a symptom of, or at the least a part of, a more extensive system. The hegemonic capitalist political economy, both at the national and increasingly at the global level, deserves a fair share of the finger pointing here. Thinkers from Marx to Polanyi have long argued, in one way or another, that the market and its growth imperative are fundamentally at odds with both environmental sustainability and social welfare (not to mention the market’s own long-term survival). Allan Schnaiberg’s Treadmill of Production (TOP) theory, as laid out in his classic book The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, is one theory to say the same, but it is an especially illustrative one for our purposes.
“The idea of the ‘treadmill,” according to environmental sociologist Tammy Lewis, “is that the system needs to extract more and more and pollute more and more simply to deliver the same level of social welfare.” In short, “the logic of the political-economic system is in conflict with both the laws of nature and with ensuring social well-being.” It’s apparent how TIAA’s investment logic, which requires constant growth to please stockholders and fund its client’s retirements, conflicts with social and environmental sustainability. Investible land will run out, and the communities standing in the way will need to be dispossessed, while the industrial agricultural operations that spring up will degrade the soil leading to deforestation of the land. Given this conflicting logic, the treadmill inevitably leads to complications that will need to be solved in one way or another. Something has to give, both for the treadmill’s sake and the people and ecological environments suffering from its greed.
Crucially, the TOP theory goes further to state that the nature of the attempted reforms shapes the degree to which they get us off of the treadmill, if at all. If reforms come from corporations or the state, both of whom depend upon growth for profit and a tax base, then they will inevitably only end up spinning the wheels of the treadmill faster. For instance, a corporation may increase its technological efficiency, making the production of commodities less resource intensive per unit. One would think an increase in resource-use efficiency would lead to a corresponding decline in environmental degradation; unfortunately, this is not always the case. Increases in efficiency, paradoxically, often lead to more resource use as corporations simply use their boost in efficiency to produce more rather than produce the same amount for less. This phenomenon, labeled Jevon’s paradox, says that productive efficiency doesn’t lead to less degradation. It simply enables more efficient profit-making and turns the dial up on the treadmill.
The solution would seem to be slowing down the treadmill or abandoning it altogether, then, rather than revving its engines. But calls for this sort of systemic transformation, whether it be towards a world free of fossil fuels or a degrowth economy, will never come from those who depend upon the treadmill’s turning: states and corporations. Pressure will instead have to come from the public sphere and the citizen-workers, who, while individually powerless in the face of the combined forces of market and state power, together can stand a chance to undermine the legitimacy of such a self-destructive system, at least, according to TOP.
TIAA and Nuveen surely are on the side of the treadmill. Their attempts at transparency and responsible investing have done little to slow the treadmill or lessen their impacts and injustices. They claim that they have been leaders in Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) since the 1970s, seeking “to implement a set of principles that support well-functioning markets in order to preserve financial, social and environmental capital.” Yet one immediately senses how the concern here doesn’t seem to be much for sustainability and social justice for their own sake, but merely as a rough proxy for financially sound investments, since “this philosophy and our approach contributes to long-term performance and helps reduce risk in our investments.”
Frustrations at their ‘transparency’ abound. According to Doug Hertzler, who is a senior policy analyst with ActionAid USA, “They put out the reports and maps, but it doesn’t allow you to really examine what’s going on.” Ultimately, like all financial institutions (and perhaps especially those in the Fortune 100), they have a fiduciary duty to their constituents to grow. That is why when the stock market’s typical assets proved financially risky following the events of 2007–2008, they looked elsewhere for a surer way to keep growing. Land, and the additional income you can reap from agricultural production on said land, became their target. And like clockwork, the environment, and the people have been suffering from this new stage of the treadmill.
While calls for getting off the treadmill will not come from the company that depends upon the treadmill for its existence, it may not be as simple as just pressuring states to change, either. According to Lewis, “pressure from the global political economy affects states’ choices, and ultimately, their socio-environmental development trajectories.” In other words, it isn’t just the state’s desire for more funds that leads to land grabs and the industrialization of agriculture. Rather, the global economy also pressures, in this case, the Brazilian government, to fall in line on the treadmill. Lewis writes, “The reordering of the global political economy that took place from the 1970s to 2017, especially with regard to Latin America’s role in the world system,…sped up the treadmill through resource extraction.”
What is particularly important here is how this perspective, which integrates world-systems theory, complicates the treadmill of production’s neat model of state, business, and citizen/labor dynamics. In addition, there are forces outside of or above the state and a whole lot of history to be reckoned with. World-systems theory was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein seemingly as “a framework…for the understanding of nearly everything.” He traces the history of the modern world and its dynamics, such as international divisions of labor, starting from where he sees its roots. For him, this is around the 1400s with the fall of feudalism, which laid the roots of agricultural capitalism and Western European colonialism.
Since then, there has been a constant hierarchy within the world, albeit with a shifting cast of characters. Various “core” countries are on top, using their political and economic power to maintain favorable terms of trade, divisions of labor and overall accumulate a large share of the world’s wealth. “Periphery” and “semi-periphery” countries (often the core’s old colonies) end up at the bottom, exporting their raw materials and products on unfavorable terms of trade.
The theory itself is controversial: one should probably expect much criticism when putting forward a framework for ‘nearly everything.’ Yet whether you trace the roots of today’s global power imbalances back to the 1400s or the Industrial Revolution, and whether or not it can actually explain everything, this framing does lend itself to this land-grabbing crisis. In short, the people of Brazil and other countries on the periphery and semi-periphery aren’t just fighting against their government and their nation’s businesses; they’re fighting a global treadmill, one that the core countries need to keep turning.
For further explanation, let’s compare this world-systems approach to a world society approach, as described by sociologist Kathleen Schwartzman in her article on globalization and the role of Brazil in the world system. In the latter perspective, the changes that Lewis explains occurring since the 70s, namely the speeding up of the treadmill in places like Latin America, could be explained by a sort of cultural diffusion. Brazilians, for instance, would notice the economic prosperity (and apparently not the imperialism) of the “core” countries and enthusiastically use this to model their own economy, no coercion required. The Global South, after some tutelage, apparently jumps on the treadmill voluntarily.
World-systems theory is not so optimistic about this trend, seeing less room for voluntariness. At the least, if periphery and semi-periphery countries do choose to get on the treadmill, there were likely minimal other choices they had. This is because, according to Schwartzman, the choices made by periphery countries are often due to changes in the core’s agenda and their new demands on the world, rather than purely self-motivated reasons from within the periphery itself.
We can see this with the core country of the U.S. As we’ve increasingly transitioned towards a service economy and as production has moved elsewhere, investment has “moved to where the supply of capital was low, and the investor’s returns were high,” namely in the ‘emerging markets’ of periphery and semi-periphery countries like Brazil. Further, our country’s shifting demographics have led to increased demands on the world, as these ‘emerging markets’ became “a desirable way of diversifying risk and investing in productive assets that will, in a few decades, fund the retirement of the baby-boom generation” (emphasis added).
The problem is that the core’s demands aren’t necessarily the wants of the periphery, but their “dependent status leaves them little choice” but to concede to the top of the hierarchy and the terms they set. In this specific case, Schwartzman describes how “Capital-poor countries in need of these capital flows are compelled to align their financial market structures with those guidelines offered by the rating and brokering houses.” These capital-poor countries (which, to remind you, are probably capital-poor because of historical events like colonization) also need to compete with each other for the capital flows of the core. Rather than cultural diffusion, coercion is what gets the ‘developing’ world on the treadmill.
From here, the role of TIAA becomes quite apparent — to support the retirement needs of the aging Boomers in the core by exploiting the markets and resources of the periphery. More broadly, core countries and their increasingly unprofitable service economies are maintaining their prominence at the top of the world system (and the treadmill) via this internationalization of financial markets, leading to our case of land grabs in places like Brazil today. Overall, the internationalization of financial markets and the process of globalization since the 1970s more broadly is the mark of a new phase in which the treadmill of production model no longer covers all the essential bases. If the public wishes to stop the treadmill for good, they need to contend not only with the extractive forces within Brazil but also with those international forces from core countries that use their place in the globalized economy for their benefit, at the expense of people and planet.
What is the public doing, then, to stop the treadmill from continuing to run its course? Of course, the indigenous peoples and peasant communities that are facing dispossession aren’t just accepting these injustices. For instance, Ribeiro of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) is fighting against land-grabs in his home state of Piauí, Brazil. One recent success involves the agribusiness giant SLC Agricola, which had been preventing the traditional riverside community of Brejeira Salto, located in the rural area of Bom Jesus in Piauí, community from being granted its right to their land. Interestingly, SLC Agricola is one example of how finance is becoming increasingly internationalized. As discussed by Schwartzman, the company was founded in 1977 as a tractor manufacturing company and eventually transitioned to growing soybeans and corn. They then began to offer shares on a stock exchange in 2007, and in 2012, they “opened a farm real estate subsidiary, SLC LandCo, in a joint venture with the British investment fund Valiance Ltda.” They eventually received help from a coalition of organizations including the Collective of Communities Impacted by Agribusiness, the Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, and Ribeiro’s CPT. With assistance from these companies and leadership primarily driven by women in the Salto area, the community was able to overcome SLC Agricola’s encroachments, secure their collective right to the land, and inspire the movement more broadly. This success was not achieved without significant risk, as outspoken leaders and committed land defenders are often targets of assassination: a report by the Indigenist Missionary Council claimed that in 2019 alone, at least 113 Indigenous people were murdered, many for similar situations as stated above.
Significantly, activists like Ribeiro are partnering beyond their affected communities to form global coalitions that can more effectively pressure entities like TIAA. One could argue this is key: a problem of world-systems proportions needs an international movement to fix it. The StopLandGrabs coalition is perhaps the largest coalition of non-profits and other organizations pushing broadly for global divestment from land-grabs. Additionally, 13 universities so far have passed resolutions calling on TIAA, one of the main providers of retirement accounts for non-profits and universities, to divest from both fossil fuel companies and land-grabs, including ours, Cornell, in March of 2021.
Related groups such as TIAA-Divest! are working to expose TIAA’s land grabbing and ties to the fossil-fuel industry and pressure them into truly responsible investing, but from the side of those invested with TIAA. As part of their April 2022 Month of Action, TIAA-Divest! activists delivered over 20,000 signatures to the TIAA CEO, CEO Thasunda Brown Ducket, at their headquarters in Manhattan. Meanwhile, outside, a crowd of over 60 gathered to show support. The petition demanded that TIAA “halt new investments in fossil fuels; fully divest from fossil fuels by 2025; and immediately stop TIAA’s acquisition of farm and timberland around the world, which is contributing to land grabs, deforestation, and environmental destruction.”
Schnaiberg is partly right — meaningful change won’t come from those dependent on the treadmill, that is, the government and businesses. But then again, what makes these coalitions special is that those who stand to benefit from the treadmill — in this case, retiring employees — are pushing alongside those whose livelihoods are threatened by said employee’s retirement plans. Sure, there is no comparing the stakes for the two. But perhaps with this international alliance across the world-systems hierarchy, with affected communities resisting on the ground in places from Brazil to the Southern U.S., and with TIAA clients standing in solidarity, petitioning and protesting the way their retirement savings are being invested from within the core, then TIAA will be forced to act and rethink its place on the treadmill. Most importantly, whether you’re a student, a professor with a TIAA retirement plan, or simply an outraged citizen, you can get involved and help make this a reality.
By: Nick Sutera
