 agencies, such as the World Bank, are lobbying for free land markets. Even with more liberal land markets, farmland remains rather illiquid, if it can only be sold as a physical land plot.
There is a clear link between standardization and liquidity. As Carruthers and Stinchcombe (1999, p. 375) argue,''[v]alue that is difficult to discern, or hard to communicate credibly to a large number of potential buyers, (…) makes an asset illiquid''. Standardization alleviates tends to increase liquidity (ibid).
Third, there are several aspects of contemporary financialization that have the potential to increase the liquidity of farmland. One example is the aggregation of farmland into large landholdings, enabling farm enterprises to issues shares, and even be listed on the stock exchange. This has been taking place in South-America with agribusiness giants such as AdecoAgro, Cosan, and Cresud, which control hundreds of thousands hectares of land and are traded on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ (Fairbairn 2014, p. 15;and personal communication). This has also occurred in post-Soviet agriculture, at an initially even greater pace (Visser and Spoor 2011;Visser et al. 2012). Another mechanism is splitting up farm enterprises into a publicly listed farmland real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns and rents outs the land, and a (non-listed) enterprise operating the farmland (Fairbairn 2014). In those cases a process of abstraction occurs, with ownership increasingly distant and dispersed (cf. Clapp 2014).

Legitimacy
As previously mentioned, this requirement refers to the extent to which an asset can be framed as 'normal', as legitimate (or at least not considered 'immoral') when treated as such, which is an important element in creating/ establishing value (Lamont 2012). Clearly, this is not an objective criterion. Relevant here is whether investors succeed to frame an investment as more or less legitimate, and to preclude that an opposite framing (as immoral) becomes dominant.
With 'peculiar goods' such as objects of nature, the process of turning it into a commodity-let alone making it into a financial asset-can be very controversial (Styhre 2013). An important feature that distinguishes land from most other resources is its strong social (life giving) function (Li 2014). Acquiring farmland in food insecure African countries for export crops or biofuel, is increasingly seen as socially unacceptable in investment circles, due to NGOs' active advocacy. 10 Further on, I will show how (and why) farmland investment in the post-Soviet region is considered much more acceptable than, for instance, in Africa.
I will now apply the typology empirically, starting with the criteria of scarcity.

Scarcity and rising farmland values: analyzing global investor discourse
Global investment reports and conferences construct the idea that land is becoming increasingly scarce and that consequently land values everywhere are bound to rise in value. The Savills report (2012, p. 14), for instance, presents a graph showing the rising number of people in the world per hectare, which is further reinforced by declining stocks of land due to urbanization and climate change. Other factors that are often stressed are dietary changes towards more livestock products in emerging economies, propping up demand for food and land. The rapid economic growth of the emerging economies is used to underline the high pace with which land is becoming scarce. Food price hikes are brought in as further proof of the food shortage and the subsequent pressing need for land. These factors are, in the investor parlance, the'market fundamentals'. Furthermore, Mark Twain's statement: ''buy land, they're not making it anymore,'' is frequently quoted in investment prospectuses to lend some literary support to the dry figures, and indicate what should be the simple, logical reaction.
Various critical studies (e.g. McMichael 2012) have shown that changes in such'market fundamentals' as population growth and diet trends are in fact rather gradual, and therefore cannot explain the short-term food price hikes or rising land values (if the latter is indeed true). 11 However, this evidence is largely absent in the investors' discourse.
Once the notion of land scarcity is firmly established discursively, it lends support to predictions of a rapid rise in global land values and the subsequent profitability of farmland investment. A Savills report (2012, p. 14) even states that: ''Our Global Farmland Index (in US$ per hectare) shows that farmland values across the globe have increased up to 1800 % during the past decade, with the highest growth recorded in the emerging markets''. With no firm data on land values in most countries beyond the West, there is a lot of room for selective interpretation. For instance, the striking figure of 1800 % was only recorded in Romania (ibid), with prices hikes much lower in all other countries. It is unclear how such reports come to a global average of land price growth.
It is, thus, relevant to more closely examine some visual representations of the 'land rush' by investment brokers. For instance, the Knight Frank farmland index (see Table 1) suggests impressive annual growth in global land values, based on 2010 price changes. However, a closer look shows that the table presents a highly selective group of cases.
First, the selected group of countries features several developed countries, only one from the African continent (Zambia), and no Asian countries. Second, most of the countries' figures do not indicate averages for their farmlands, but only certain, mostly well-endowed, agricultural regions. For instance, the figures for Brazil include ''Dryland double cropping in Mato Grosso'' or ''West Bahia''. For Argentina, only the Northern and central provinces are included. For Canada, only Saskatchewan is included. This is a rather exceptional Canadian region, where investors from outside the province had not been allowed to buy land until recently, which drastically contained the rise of land prices (Sommerville and Magnan 2015). With the abolishment of this regulation, prices have jumped to the level of neighboring provinces. In other cases, land prices are only presented for land with rather good characteristics (e.g. ''quality dryland in corn belt states'' for the United States, or ''dryland arable with reliable rainfall'' for Australia). Third, there are serious questions about the reliability of the underlying data, especially for countries in the Global South. Fourth, and finally, in some of the listed countries with high land price hikes, this rise has already flattened or stagnated since the data was collected (in 2009/2010). In Argentina, for instance, due to economic crisis and increased export taxes on agricultural commodities, many outside investors have withdrawn from agriculture. Land prices are still growing only in the prime agricultural areas of central Argentina, and at a much lower pace. 12 In neighboring Brazil, agricultural production continues to boom-in the soy producing regions-and land prices continue to rise. However, with the recent crisis in the sugar sector, land prices in the sugar producing regions are stagnating, albeit not falling. 13 My intention here is not to argue that the rise of land prices does not occur at all. Rather, I argue that it is not a universal, global, and unilinear trend. The rise of land value is, for instance, clearly happening in parts of Brazil, the United States, and Romania. However, such cases feature a rare conjunction of factors favorable for rises in land prices, which are absent in most other contexts. In Romania, for instance, the initial low land prices combine with a relatively good river infrastructure, ports with easy access to the world market, and a number of EU-related features, such as proximity, and free access, to the EU market, agricultural subsidies, and good legal protection of land rights. Furthermore, Romania's 2007 accession to the EU coincides neatly with the global land rush. All these factors created an ideal context-or a 'perfect storm'-for a land price hike. Therefore, the case of Russia would likely be closer to the typical developments of many developing and emerging countries, and therefore more instructive.
To sum up, tables used to depict the farmland rush, such as the one analyzed above, are far from a general reflection of global land price developments. Instead, they are highly selective representations performing a key function in the assemblage of farmland as an attractive financial asset.
While asset making is largely a matter of the imaginary, consisting of narratives, tables, and graphs, I will argue that it cannot persist in the longer term without a base in the material world (real scarcity of land and rising farmland prices). As Williams (2014) and Loftus and March (2015) contend, the materiality of the objects being financialized Source: Originally published in The Wealth Report produced by Knight Frank Research (Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank 2011) remains important. In the following sections, based on the example of post-Soviet farmland investment, I show how growing evidence of 'false scarcity' and stagnating land prices has begun to undermine the investor imaginary promoting farmland as an asset.
Scarcity and rising farmland values: post-Soviet investor discourse and institutional conditions Investor discourse I now turn to evidence from the former Soviet region, which-despite being a hotspot of large-scale land deals since 2006 (Visser et al. 2012)-has received little scholarly attention. This section and the following ones will draw on data from Russia (and, to some extent, Ukraine), 14 whose vast stretches of fertile-including abandonedland seemed to hold great promise for global and domestic land investors. The analysis is based on web-search, interviews, farm visits, and participation in investor conferences and meetings. 15 Numerous factors