Local Struggles as a Resource for Multinational Corporations: Romanian Farm Managers Facing Agricultural Commodity Traders

Several multinational corporations engaged in the trading of agricultural commodities have been active in Romania for several decades. To explain this situation, international business studies put the emphasis on transaction costs and a series of variables that guide location choices. This line of reasoning fails to take proper account of local power relations. The notion of “field”, as conceived by Pierre Bourdieu, offers an alternative. In Romania, multinational corporations contribute to the formation of an entrepreneurial field in which the issue at stake is the exercise of local symbolic power. Their ability to collect and store grain in the long term depends at the same time on this structural organisation. To account for this situation, we need to examine successive decollectivization measures and the resulting benefits for multinational corporations. After the fall of the Communist regime, agricultural entrepreneurs first took advantage of the restitution and redistribution of land to cultivate cereals and oilseeds over vast areas. All of them aim to export their products. However, they have difficulty in controlling this choice due to limited storage capacity. As a matter of fact, multinational corporations engaged in agricultural commodity trading took advantage of a second reform package and now control the main silos. Entrepreneurs looking to sell their crops have to deal with these constraints. Their approach depends on the capital they have at their disposal. This led to internal conflicts, the developments of which we have examined between 2010 and 2017.