Vital Capital Investments LP, the private-equity firm that invests in housing and agriculture businesses in Africa, said it raised more than $250 million for its first fund.

In recent years sixteen investors, from Israel, Ethiopia and the Netherlands, have opened large-scale farms nearby the village of Hidi, south of Addis Ababa.

"I will give [Nigeria's] CHICASON not less than 50,000 acres of land anywhere in the country," says the President of Sierra Leone.

Israel has asked Russia's republic of Tatarstan to lease 1.5 million hectares of its land, said a visiting Israeli businessman on Friday.

Vietnamese and Chinese investors will cultivate 10,000 acres and 15,000 acres of land for rice and cassava in Edo State, Nigeria, respectively.

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi calls it the “new feudalism.” Groups representing peasant farmers call it “land grabs.” The United Nations literature dispersed at this week's UN food summit in Rome calls it “direct foreign investment.”

BDFC has already been given 17,400ha of land in 2008 for the production of sugar cane, a year after it came to Ethiopia. It is also getting close to receiving an additional 13,000hct in the same area of the Tana-Beles Basin of Jawi Wereda, Hawi Zone of Amhara Regional State.

The Congolese government said it had signed similar agreements with China, Brazil and Israel.

El ministro de agricultura congoleño, Rigobert Maboundou, dijo que este acuerdo forma parte de un Plan de Acción de su Gobierno para consolidar la agricultura como un pilar de su economía y que, además de este pacto, el mayor de este tipo firmado en África, tienen otros similares con China, Brasil e Israel.

Hostility to foreign investment in a sensitive border area has forced the Turkish government to shelve plans to turn a minefield along its frontier with Syria into organic farmland.

Cambodia's traditional sectors are foundering in the wake of the global financial crisis, but the Kingdom's farmlands could bring billions from Middle Eastern countries seeking food security.

An Israeli delegation is set to visit Cambodia on March 16, hoping to forge agreements in agriculture and telecommunications