Money, meaning, and territory: family business groups and agro-extractive systems in Latin America

Family business groups play a significant role in Latin America’s agro-extractive systems. While research on agro-extractivism has focused primarily on territorial expansion and transnational agribusiness, less attention has been paid to the actors that coordinate relations across multiple sites and stages of value chains. Drawing on critical socio-spatial perspectives, this article examines family business groups as organisational actors that connect fragmented agro-extractive relations. It approaches these coordinating activities as family-mediated forms of spatial ordering through which extraction, processing, circulation, and value realisation become connected across territories and organisational settings. A comparative analysis of the Maggi group (Brazil), the Angelini group (Chile) and the González Hank group (Mexico) reconstructs contrasting forms of family-mediated spatial ordering associated with different organisational positions in agro-extractive systems. The comparison demonstrates that family business groups connect fragmented agro-extractive relations through distinct forms of territorial concentration, organisational mediation, and market centrality. The findings suggest that these coordinating functions emerge from different organisational positions but share a common capacity to connect relations that are otherwise organised through separate institutions and arenas.