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Governments in a number of countries are trying to address concerns about land grabbing by closing their borders to foreign investors. Are these restrictions effective? Not really, says GRAIN.
US-based Aslan Global Management, a leader in the "patient capital" movement, manages more than 12,000 hectares of farmland in Ukraine and Mozambique on long-term lease and just entered into a 99-year lease for 45,000 hectares in Tanzania.
The proceeds of the investment will be used to install sugar beet processing equipment and to further develop sugar beet growing operations in the region, through a joint venture with Continental Farming Group.
Ukraine’s parliament extended a ban on sales of farmland by three years to January 2016, giving time to prepare related legislation.
Ukraine will have no farmland market in the near future, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn has said.
Japan wants to grow corn on Ukraine's black earth and import it while Ukraine suggests that Japan, as a "hi-tech country", invest in Ukrainian farmland.
In Ukraine, MPs did not extend land sale moratorium, but experts say it is legally impossible to launch market on January 1, 2013
Public-private partnership program envisions letting investors farm up to 4 million hectares of currently unused government land for up to 50 years in large-scale 400,000-hectare projects.
Saudi Arabia has invested around 40 billion riyals in agricultural and livestock projects in the Ukraine, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and Sudan, says chairman of the agricultural investment committee at the Saudi Council of Chambers.
In 2012, Terra Project started a long term documentation investigating the drivers, the trends, the mechanisms and the impacts of land acquisitions across the world.
HighQuest Partners in the US say that between 65-80 million hectares of additional land is going to have to be brought into production, globally, within the next 10 years and that this means more foreign farmland investment.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is considering making an equity investment of up to $15.9 million to acquire a minority stake in ED&F Man Ukraine Investments BV
