‘I want to sleep at night as well’: Guilt and Care in the Making of Agricultural Credit Markets

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Langford, Alexandra
Brekelmans, Alana
Lawrence, Geoffrey
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Prince, Russell

Henry, Matthew

Morris, Carolyn

Gallagher, Aisling

FitzHerbert, Stephen

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2021
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Abstract

In the pastoral lands of northern Australia, properties are typically very large and remote and experience severe fluctuations in land values and unpredictable environmental patterns. Most pastoralists are financed by bank credit, which is an important tool for managing business development plans and responding to situations of drought and changes in market conditions. This credit is serviced by a small group of professional agri-finance bankers who often reside in the region and develop long-term relationships with their clients. In this chapter, we explore the role of these relationships between pastoral landholders and bankers in shaping and moderating credit markets. We show that these relationships are not only symptomatic but also generative of moral economies in agricultural credit markets. Our evidence suggests that relationship lending might not only increase access to credit during economic contractions, as has been previously reported, but might also decrease access to credit during economic expansions. These relationships mediate the effects of global capital markets on northern Australian pastoralism, influencing patterns of financing in the region. This contributes to understandings of financialisation as assembled by a diverse range of work by both financial and non-financial actors, whose interactions contribute to and resist financialising patterns in often unpredictable ways.

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Markets in their place: Context, culture, finance

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1st

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Human geography

Sociology

Political economy and social change

Agricultural economics

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Langford, A; Brekelmans, A; Lawrence, G, ‘I want to sleep at night as well’: Guilt and Care in the Making of Agricultural Credit Markets, Markets in their place: Context, culture, finance, 2021

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