Geopolitics of the financialization of nature and development in Latin America

This chapter addresses how the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the severe ecological crisis that had been looming globally since the 1970s and, at the same time, deepened the trends of a multidimensional crisis, in which the drive for capital valorization and accumulation continues to feed on political, social, economic, and environmental breakdowns in the context of growing financialization. It is argued here that three important variables stand out in this process of financialization: energy, food, and water. All of these resources have been exploited by large transnational corporations and institutional investors, who speculate on them through securitized instruments in financial derivative markets, taking advantage of their demand and scarcity to yield substantial profits. In other words, the financialization of natural resources, in a broader and global context—rendered invisible within these financial markets—leads to the dispossession of the natural wealth of peripheral countries for the benefit of profits in central countries and, in turn, perpetuates accumulation by dispossession in underdeveloped economies, such as those in Latin America.