Investing for profit,investing for impact: Moral performances in agricultural investment projects

Performing productivity: Values in mainstream agricultural investment

Among mainstream investors, economic performance is the dominant evaluative principle, and the only one that receives explicit recognition. ³ The idea that a company should be measured by the profit it produces (rather than, say, its positive impact on the world) has an intellectual legacy dating back to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” This perspective got a boost from the shifting power relations associated with financialization: the increasing size and clout of investors since the 1980s was accompanied by the ascent of the “shareholder value” model of corporate governance, which dictates that a company is only as good as the returns it produces for investors (Lazonick and O’Sullivan, 2000). This perspective also has a legal basis; many types of financial and corporate managers have a legal obligation, known as a “fiduciary duty,” to act in their client or shareholders’ best interest by earning the highest possible rate of return. Fiduciary duty may discourage corporate managers from taking actions deemed socially or environmentally beneficial if doing so would in any way reduce the returns they earn for their clients (Windsor, 2006). This perspective was forcefully captured by Friedman (1970), who repudiated the idea of corporate social responsibility as “pure socialism,” asserting that “the [only] social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

The official primacy of the financial bottom line is reflected in the agendas of agricultural investment conferences, where explicit discussion of the morally sensitive topics associated with large-scale land acquisitions is generally compressed into a single panel with a title making reference to, for instance, “responsible investment,” “sustainability,” or “social and environmental stewardship.” Although the social and cultural values associated with land ownership may here be addressed head-on, they are nonetheless often given second billing to profit-making imperatives. At one such session that I (Fairbairn) attended at the height of the farmland investment boom, four presenters showcased their companies’ programs to address environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility, some of which were quite extensive. Strikingly, however, each speaker resorted to economic justifications when explaining the need for such programs; doing the right thing, the audience was told again and again, is just good business sense.

The first speaker, the manager of an agricultural fund with land and companies across Africa, described a company program to give out free bicycles to employees as follows: “it means that our workers don’t have to walk 10 km to their jobs every day, which means that they are much more efficient and are much happier workers.” The second speaker, representing a company that owns and operates land in South America, likewise characterized social and environmental programs as a means to achieve an economic end. Partnerships with local NGOs to address malnutrition and provide education were framed repeatedly in terms of cultivating the human capital of employees: “those hungry kids are your future workers.” Environmentally friendly farming practices were similarly justified in terms of their economic efficiencies—if you don’t use no-till farming, he explained, “you’re just pouring money into the ground.” The following presenters continued in the same vein: community participation in project decision-making, philanthropic contributions to community health and education, and natural resource stewardship were all framed in terms of their utilitarian contributions to productive efficiency, not as values in their own right.

Perhaps even more important than the money to be made by acting ethically is the money to be lost by not acting ethically. As a cautionary tale, the final speaker on this panel pointed to South Korean company Daewoo’s 2008 deal to acquire 2 million hectares of farmland in Madagascar, which ended in the company’s ouster from the country and likely also contributed to the government’s overthrow. His conclusion from this story was that: “You have to care about more than the bottom line in order to mitigate risk.” This sentiment, a common one among agricultural investors, once again treats moral values as an instrumental means to secure profits in the face of social, cultural, and political friction. Though the exact terminology varies—“reputational,” “brand,” or “headline” risk—the underlying idea is that morally charged issues such as crop exports from food insecure regions or land acquisitions involving displacement of local people should be either avoided entirely or addressed with actions of prophylactic morality because they pose a risk to the bottom line.

However, while social and environmental outcomes are not the focus of investment decision-making, it does not follow that mainstream agricultural investors are just so many homo economicus, nor that they view nature as an uncomplicated commodity. Like other economic actors, they operate in multiple, overlapping realms of value (Stark, 2009), conveying an implicit normativity through their daily speech and practices. As will be shown below, however, their ethical norms are premised, in large part, on the same thing as their profitability: their productivity. By signaling their productivity, they exempt themselves from the perennial ethical accusation levied against financiers—that of gambling with the wealth generated by others rather than producing it themselves (De Goede, 2005)—as well as the more specific accusations directed at large-scale farmland acquisitions—that of fueling poverty and hunger by stripping away livelihoods and food sources.

Those promoting large-scale agricultural investment regularly deploy narratives about food and resource scarcity (Fairbairn, 2014; Li, 2014; Visser, 2016). According to these accounts, farmland is scarce and vanishing rapidly due to urbanization, desertification, and climate change. Food is in short supply too, and will only become more so as population grows, the Chinese middle class consumes more meat, and grain is used up for biofuels. A report by the Swiss firm Land Commodities Asset Management (2009: 6) furnishes a good example of this narrative:

Every day the total population of planet earth increases by over 200,000 people … an additional 148,460 hectares of land are required daily to feed the 200,000 new arrivals … These startling figures dramatically illustrate the challenge of feeding the world’s exponentially growing population with an arithmetically growing farming base. The consequent, increasing scarcity of farmland has resulted in rapidly rising farmland prices across almost all regions of the world.

These scarcity narratives can be seen as value stories, which play an essential role in organizing overlapping realms of value. As surely as any official valuation metric, they tell market participants what is valuable (grain, developed agricultural land) and what is not (subsistence farming, customary land tenure). They are effective precisely because they are not rigidly evaluative, but rather play on the emotions and rouse the “animal spirits.” Their affective persuasive power renders them performative: their depictions of “underutilized lands” whose prices will inevitably skyrocket with the slightest infusion of capital summon the very investor capital needed to set the process in motion (Li, 2014). However, this performativity is strictly perlocutionary; investors cannot simply talk land prices into rising, but (weather, commodity prices, and the Federal Reserve willing), the excitement they generate could give prices a boost.

These value stories position agricultural investment projects as worthwhile in both economic and moral terms while also casting the project promoters and their prospective investors as upright individuals. In an interview, for instance, the manager of a fund with agricultural properties in the U.S., Australia, and South America described the need to bring more farmland into production through emphatic warnings of global food shortages:

I am passionate about this. If we don’t do something we are going to die. It’s that simple. And it’s not going to be pleasant. It’s going to be pleasant for me. I have my own farm. I can produce everything I need, but most people are going to suffer and I hate to see people suffering. I mean, why? When we have so much. There’s no reason for any of this to happen. Zero.

Another type of productivity-oriented value story emphasizes the use of investment capital to transform and add value to farmland. For example, I interviewed a senior executive at a Brazilian agricultural operating company that has increasingly engaged in the buying and reselling of farms. In order to increase the value of their properties, the company engages in “transformations” such as improving the soil or adding infrastructure. In the midst of discussing this investment strategy, the executive paused to say, “Of course we’ve got to realize that transformation means production. So we are not speculating in the sense that we’re just buying land and sitting on it and waiting for something to happen.” It was important to him to clarify that his company was actively adding value to land by investing capital in it, and that this expense of effort and money placed them among the productive actors of the world. This statement performatively contributes to economic value, since a company that generates land price appreciation rather than waiting for unpredictable land markets to deliver will likely be seen as a better bet by investors. However, the statement “we are not speculating” also carries deep moral significance. It acts as a way of “framing” (Callon, 1998a) the activity, differentiating moral from immoral activity and positioning the speaker among the more righteous economic producers. This cultivation of moral identity is subtle, subsumed in a broader landscape of value in which investment return is the hegemonic principle of evaluation, but its occasional appearances—often in response to local friction—reveal the implicit moral work that underlies value creation in mainstream capital markets.

The head-heart intersection: Values in impact investing

In contrast to the mainstream investors discussed above, impact investors comprise a subculture that sees itself as a financial breed apart. The term impact investing was coined at a 2007 meeting convened by the Rockefeller Foundation, which launched its Impact Investing Initiative the next year with generous resources allotted to grants, program-related investments, and the creation of new market infrastructure (Harji and Jackson, 2012). Spanning a range of business models—from “impact first” ventures with high impact and low profit margins to “finance first” investments with low impact and high profit (Monitor, 2009)—they collectively distinguish themselves from other financial sectors by claiming to subordinate market valuation to environmental or social values. Aspiring to merge conventional capital pools and philanthropic values, they claim to remoralize markets in the process. The sector has attracted a particular clientele that includes wealthy individual philanthropists, specialized ethical funds, and cause-oriented endowments. Most investors in this sector are exempt from the strict fiduciary responsibility standards that bind the mainstream investors discussed above, allowing them to foreground ethical commitments over a singular profit motive.

Central to impact investors’ claims to remoralize markets is their desire to not only create new financial value, but also, more importantly, to multiply the kinds of value recognized by financial markets. Social and environmental impact, in their vernacular, are understood as categories of value different from and irreducible to financial value—different orders of worth, in Boltanski and Thévenot’s terms—that investors attempt to reconcile into a coherent, multivalent economic system that will be driven, according to one founding investor, as much by an “invisible heart” as Adam Smith’s oft-cited “invisible hand” (Roberts, 2013). “Impact,” as used in the sector, measures ethics in investment practice.

Because impact investing is so novel and has little legibility outside of special interest audiences, actors in the field experience difficulty communicating how they occupy different orders of worth at the same time. The financial value of their investments is easily quantified using existing measurement systems; non-monetary categories of impact, however, appear much more abstract, unsubstantiated, or idealistic to outsiders. An influential early report, for instance, identified the need to develop an enabling infrastructure for the sector, including “models, theories, policies, protocols, standards, and established language” (Monitor, 2009: 21), in order to convince skeptical potential funders that it is indeed possible to deliver measurable environmental and social impact while making money.

In their efforts to bridge this intelligibility gap and inaugurate a pluralistic value regime, impact investors legitimize their work through moral performances via leadership programs, conferences, industry literature, social media campaigns, and other modes of discursive production. Through these performative genres, many impact funds and organizations actively establish themselves as cultural as much as economic institutions. One example is Acumen Fund, a leader in the field of impact investing that targets agriculture as a key investment area for alleviating poverty. (It was also an early funder of the agricultural investment profiled in the case study below.) Acumen hosts an annual Global Fellows Program, a leadership program whose stated goal is to cultivate the “architects,” “game changers,” and “visionaries” of the new social innovation sector (Miller, 2010). Launched in 2005, the program accepts ten participants annually out of hundreds of global applicants who arrive in New York City to undertake two months of intensive training in financial and management skills as well as what Acumen founder Jacqueline Novogratz calls “moral imagination,” the cornerstone of the fund’s approach to impact. Fellows then spend nine months in the field working at one of Acumen’s global investee companies.

In this context, moral imagination requires learning to perform oneself as a financial subject in particular ways. Leading the New York-based segment of the Fellows Program, Novogratz explains to participants that moral imagination requires audacity and humility, empathy and decisiveness (Bryant, 2012). These qualities are developed through, among other activities, intensive study of Acumen’s “Good Society Reading List” (largely compiled of classics from western liberal thought, from Rousseau to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and a workshop on “understanding the ‘other’” in which fellows are sent out to access public services and survive in the outer boroughs of New York City for a full day without money or a cell phone. Such exercises are intended to develop the two qualities Novogratz prizes most, humility and audacity: “You’ve got to have the humility to see the world as it is – and in our world, working with poor communities, that’s not easy to do – but have the audacity to know why you are trying to make it be different, to imagine the way it could be” (Bryant, 2012). Acumen Fund, like many other actors in the sector, does not just look for these people; through conferences and leadership programs such as their Global Fellows Program, they hope to create them.

Moral imagination is often displayed through storytelling practices, which are not only central to subject formation in cultural venues like the conferences and fellowship programs mentioned above; they are also central to generating new capital for the sector by narrating for potential investors how environmental and social impact is, in fact, valuable. Through their value stories, impact investors make social and environmental value legible to a wider investor audience in narrative, rather than quantitative, form by emphasizing investors’ compassionate dedication to pulling people out of poverty. Stories also act as a connective tissue integrating plural value systems. As impact communication strategist Suzanne Muchin explains, the most important skill impact entrepreneurs can acquire is to be able to speak to people’s “head-heart intersection,” to find out what they care about, and convince them that you care about it too. “That intersection,” she advises, “can only be identified through a story” (Muchin, 2013). Indeed, at a panel on “Measuring Impact” at a social entrepreneurship conference, the director of a UK-based social value evaluation company started his presentation by dispelling the myth that “it’s all about the numbers.” In the social capital sphere, he countered, “it’s not.” Instead, “it’s all about the stories,” and the only way to resolve the methodological challenge of how to measure seeming intangibles such as social impact is “just to continue telling stories” (Coburn, 2013).

Narratives are inextricable from the everyday valuation practices employed across the sector. Some narratives draw on quantitative evaluation data to tell stories, while others alter or abandon data altogether to let the value story come through. The narrative layers that curate impact investors’ value claims about agricultural investment projects were brought into focus for me (Kish) when I met an investment manager at a West Africa-based impact fund. According to her, many investees had been lulled into bad reporting habits by years of foreign grant money, which was seen as “free money” not requiring the assiduous accounting standards of the financial sector. As a result of this ingrained culture of fudging numbers without consequence, the investment manager said she interpreted her investees’ data to mostly comprise “ballpark” figures—“it’s like building a house of cards, and the foundation is not strong.” Under the impression that she was being fed numerical fictions by the entrepreneurs she invested in, she resorted to her own creative accounting. She took, for instance, the quarterly sales numbers and social metrics reported to her by an investee seed vendor, and liberally gave them “haircuts” of up to fifty percent because they didn’t feel right to her.

By editing the data to fit the value story she wants to tell, this investment manager demonstrates how value creation is mediated through multiple layers of performativity, in which economic subjects must negotiate more than the price of land, seeds, or other commodities or services. For impact investors, the unique sources of value proffered by their triple bottom line model consist in the social and environmental “returns” they promise. Investors and fund managers must therefore reiteratively produce and stabilize the conditions in which social and environmental impact metrics are made valuable within the market. These values must also be present in the right amount—not too little, or else the investment doesn’t create any “impact,” and not too much, or it will appear unrealistic and could discredit the broader industry at this early, vulnerable stage. Even the most rudimentary social balance sheet for a small impact investment such as the regional seed vendor in West Africa is a performance from the direction of the entrepreneur, who attempts to satisfy the expectations of his investor, and from the direction of the investment manager, who needs proof that her investment has impact.

Like mainstream investors, impact investors operate simultaneously in multiple value registers, positioning their ventures as at once profitable and ethical. However, while mainstream investors conduct their value juggling act behind the scenes, folding social and environmental goals into the pursuit of profit, impact investors do it in the open, making moral values the centerpoint of their capital raising efforts. Their value stories and self-fashioning as ethical subjects are intrinsic to their market-making activities: through these practices they define themselves as mission-driven economic subjects, attract new converts to the sector, and make their values scrutable to investors. As impact investor Kevin Jones tweeted to his followers in the industry: “Sell the value we have, to more people, by telling a better story” (Jones, 2011).

Quifel: Faltering attempts to manage value plurality

In 2009, Quifel Natural Resources (QNR), an investment company owned by a Portuguese publishing tycoon, began seeking investors for a large-scale agricultural project in Mozambique operating via a subsidiary called Hoyo Hoyo. The project involved two large land concessions from the Mozambican government, totaling 30,000 ha, which would be put to intensive use growing soy, sesame, and sunflower. ⁴ Here, we describe the company’s iterative and evolving performances of value, highlighting an episode in which these enactments came under attack. The case of Quifel reveals that, even for mainstream investors who largely promote their operations in terms of economic value alone, moral tension is always simmering just below the surface, its occasional eruptions fraught with danger.

When it was first working to raise investment capital, Quifel circulated a promotional document that provides a window into the kinds of value that the company expected to generate through its foray into Mozambican agriculture, as well as the value stories it used to entice investors. The investment pitch it contained began by painting a picture of rising food demand due to population growth and increasing consumption in emerging markets: “The Project is driven by the belief that there is an opportunity for QNR and new investors to benefit from increasing worldwide demand for agricultural and food products as (i) the world population increases and (ii) GPD [sic] per capita expands, especially in Asia and Africa” (Quifel, 2009: 2). It then went on to position Sub-Saharan Africa as the solution to this growing food demand—“the next investment frontier”—due to its cheap land and labor. Indeed, inexpensive land and labor forms the centerpiece of the investment pitch: “Keeping in mind that the costs for the land and labour are at a fraction of the costs of Brazil, the Project is likely to show an extremely lucrative return over a seven year period” (Quifel, 2009: 5).

The worth of the Hoyo Hoyo project is expressed in purely economic terms: this is an investment opportunity predicated on gaining access to very large tracts of land virtually free of charge and rapidly converting them to intensive agricultural production. The promotional materials projected financial revenues five years into the future based on a brisk expansion of cultivated area, starting with 8000 ha in 2010 and reaching over 30,000 ha by 2015 (Quifel, 2009). Assuming this swift rollout, Quifel predicted that Hoyo Hoyo would be making impressive annual returns of 41.6% by 2015, at which point the investors could successfully exit the investment either via sale to a strategic buyer or by taking the company public with an initial public offering on the London or South African stock exchange (Quifel, 2009). ⁵ The document made no mention of any planned social or environmental programs.

All of the financial forecasts made by the company were transparently performative; the impressive projected returns were crucial to conjuring the investor capital that would make those returns even remotely possible. The obligatory legal disclaimer at the end of the document acknowledges that this is a case of perlocutionary performativity: “All statements … are forward-looking statements subject to a number of uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from statements made.” In other words, under felicitous circumstances, these impressive returns might indeed come to pass, but infelicitous circumstances could easily produce a misfire.

A 2010 interview with a Hoyo Hoyo executive at the company’s headquarters in Quelimane, Mozambique offered a fuller picture of the company’s approach to managing the multiplicity of values associated with agricultural land. The executive told me (Fairbairn) that the company had, in fact, allocated a million dollars for social spending in communities affected by its land acquisitions. However, he mentioned this almost in passing—as a requirement of the job, rather than a moral mission. Meanwhile, he portrayed the consultations with affected communities required by Mozambican law as a necessary evil: they were overly time consuming and they invited fraud by community members who, he said, would set up houses on the property as a means to glean compensation money from the company. Yet, while summarily dismissing the official mechanism created to ensure that agricultural investment projects benefit local people, the executive nonetheless conveyed a strong belief that his company was doing good. He insisted that the successful implementation of extensive, high-yield agriculture was absolutely essential to defeating hunger and advancing development in Mozambique.

Creating this kind of economic development, furthermore, required serious and well-funded agricultural companies. The 1980s, the executive explained, saw a rash of speculation in Mozambican land, leading the government to institute a rigorous vetting process for companies requesting land. Unlike this earlier generation of speculators, Quifel had passed official scrutiny and was therefore, by implication, a genuinely productive actor capable of bolstering food security and enriching the country. This promise of productivity was all that was necessary for Quifel to fulfill its own (and presumably its investors’) moral vision; everything else—the million dollars in social spending and the community consultations—served as a moral hedging strategy.

This approach to negotiating value plurality foundered when, in 2011 and 2012, Quifel was hit with a barrage of negative publicity accusing them of socially irresponsible investing (Charles, 2012; Hanlon, 2011; Norfolk and Hanlon, 2012). Researchers and mainstream media outlets reported that the company had never fulfilled promises of monetary and land compensation made during community consultations. Perhaps more significantly for Quifel, however, the accounts also challenged the company’s claims to producing value in its own terms, framing them as minimally productive actors who engaged in land speculation. At a World Bank meeting, Norfolk and Hanlon (2012) reported that Quifel had rolled out production at a snail’s pace, that they had begun farming on land already plowed by villagers rather than clearing virgin land, and that their slow progress might be due to lack of funds. They further pointed out that at the time Quifel was trying to recruit investors with its depictions of 30,000 ha of virgin land, these very land concessions had yet to be approved by the government, suggesting that the company had embellished their land holdings as a means to raise investor capital. In questioning Quifel’s claims to agricultural productivity, this critique removed the fulcrum balancing the company’s claims of financial and moral performance.

For mainstream agricultural investors like Quifel, economic rather than moral performance is the primary means to attract capital and launch an investment project, yet too little moral ballast can become a liability. Quifel conjured investment capital with performative depictions of the vast, low-cost land concessions it had been granted as well as with its ability to quickly convert these properties into highly productive, large-scale farms. The company’s optimistic production figures and return expectations, however, were performative only in the perlocutionary sense: they were predicated on everything going exactly right, including claiming a land concession for which they had yet to receive final approval. In contrast, the company claimed to make a positive impact in the lives of local people only to the limited extent necessary to complete the community consultation process and ensure a minimal level of local legitimacy.

Though an overt moral performance was not needed for the company to raise capital from its intended financial audience, morally-based critiques remained a potential source of reputational risk, and this moral friction added to the possibility of performative misfire. Ultimately, Quifel’s minimal moral hedging strategy proved a weakness and the company was forced to do damage control; the CEO released a statement that devoted roughly equal amounts of space to morally justifying the company’s actions to an outside audience (in terms of contributions to community wellbeing) and to an investor audience (as producers rather than unproductive land speculators) (Laurentino, 2012). ⁶ The case demonstrates that moral modes of justification are essential to the performative success of agricultural investment projects, even when economic evaluation appears to be the dominant evaluative criterion.

GADCO: A mélange of valuable fictions

Impact investors perform ethical value toward different ends than mainstream investors. Their value stories interweave economic performance with social and environmental objectives to reinforce their mutual interdependence. However, as these narratives travel across borders and address different audiences along the investment chain, they experience the additional strain that occurs when ethical and economic mandates conflict with one another. In practice, the integration of multiple value regimes is not seamless; moral returns may not be given the equal footing they were touted as having. The inconsistency between what “good” investors claim they are doing and what their projects actually achieve on the ground is illustrated in an Acumen-funded impact investment in southeast Ghana.

Global Agri-Development Company, or GADCO, Coöperatif U.A., is a commercial rice operation that promised to leverage the resources of its central hub farm to help local smallholder growers. Acumen Fund was an initial investor, in addition to start-up grants and investments the farm received from an assortment of other development agencies, impact-oriented funds, and foundations. ⁷ When Acumen announced their investment in the farm, they touted its mandate to address food insecurity in Ghana, increase local employment, and boost the productivity of local smallholder farmers. In her quarterly letter to stakeholders in the winter of 2012, Acumen CEO Novogratz explained the fund’s decision to expand into West Africa as a matter of acting on “our values around patient capital and moral leadership.” A Ghanaian executive at the fund told me (Kish), that as one of Acumen’s inaugural investments in West Africa, the farm represented an important “social impact story” for Acumen, for the local Fievie community, and for Ghana.

However, field research revealed gaps between the celebratory “social impact story” circulated in the North American social capital community and the reality on the ground. Despite claims of boosting local employment and providing social and environmental benefits to the surrounding community, employment has remained low since the company’s 2010 founding because the farm is highly mechanized and mainly draws skilled labor from other parts of the country. It is unclear how the project boosts local entrepreneurship, given that the founding entrepreneurs are from Nigeria and Brazil, rather than Ghana, and the company is registered in Amsterdam and headed by a British chairman. In addition, in order to modernize and control the entire value production chain, the farm partnered with a number of international agribusinesses including Syngenta and Finatrade. Further, despite Acumen’s much-publicized commitment to the triple bottom line, the farm uses conventional pesticides and fertilizers rather than organic inputs, and monocrops rice at a commercial scale.

In an interview two years after the farm’s establishment, I asked the farm manager what social and environmental metrics the company used to assess their extra-economic impacts. He admitted that they weren’t, in fact, tracking or measuring any of the social and environmental indicators that Acumen and other impact investment funds tout as the unique innovation of their sector. Indeed, the next time I visited the farm, the manager followed up on our conversation by asking if I could suggest social and environmental metrics for him to research in order to create his own for the company. When I spoke with the Fievie villagers who lived next to the farm and granted its managers access to over 1000 ha of their land through a rent-free, revenue-sharing agreement, they told me that two years into their agreement, the company had not yet transferred any payments. Further, no one in the village had been employed by the company, despite one village woman informing me that local employment was part of the company’s agreement with the community. ⁸

The absence of social metrics and environmental accounting by the company managers betrayed a lack of substantial social and environmental dividends to the Fievie, who told me they were confused about when or if they would be receiving the agreed-upon 2.5% revenue sharing allocation. A 2014 report on the company found that laborers brought in to work on the commercial nucleus farm were unhappy, citing low wages, the shoddy boots and equipment they were given, unreliable company transportation, and the company’s failure to provide promised accommodations (Wan, 2014). When I pressed the farm manager about the villagers’ concerns, he boasted that the company had cleared and irrigated small plots of land for locals to cultivate, and added some lights to the local schoolhouse. Addressing this low bar of social returns, one of the founding partners reiterated the company’s commitment to the “triple bottom line” while also stating that, “We’re not tree-huggers, but we’re not going to go chasing profit in ways that are irresponsible” (Wan, 2014).

The GADCO farm project is thus an interesting case study in the global economy of impact investing, particularly when it comes to the unique challenges of agricultural investment. Founded as an impact investment that raised capital based on perlocutionary narratives of impending social and environmental returns, this company profited from the industry-wide performance of ethical responsibility. By reiterating their value stories frequently and with enough conviction to moneyed, “conscious” audiences, impact fund managers and entrepreneurs are able to raise capital for their projects regardless of whether the presumed value creation is ever accounted for or, indeed, produced. GADCO, for instance, was able to raise multiple rounds of funding from private investment funds and development agencies without having to report on any social and environmental indicators over at least the first two years of operation.

Acumen eventually withdrew their support for the project due to the company’s persistent failure to develop and track social and environmental impact targets. However, the initial impact-oriented funding GADCO raised was sufficient to launch it as a successful commercial venture, and Acumen still touts the project’s social impact on its website. Both actors continue to accrue value for their respective operations through the continuing circulation of narratives of social impact, even if no one could demonstrate any meaningful improvement in the lives of local populations.