UK

Farming is a sector that Insight Investment, a UK asset manager best known for its expertise in investing in corporate bonds and government debt, has begun to target.

The extent of the surge in UK farmland prices has driven foreign buyers and pension funds to the sidelines, leaving farmers to pay prices more than double those three years ago, property consultancy Savills said.

Fifty year lease agreement for 20,980 ha signed between Miro Forestry (SL) Limited and representatives of the Yoni Chiefdom, Tonkolili District, Sierra Leone in December 2011.

With the merger, Alpcot Agro now controls well over 250,000 hectares of farmland in Russia and the Ukraine.

Tony Hales, managing director of Stadia Trustees, puts forward the case for including farmland in clients’ self-invested personal pensions (UK)

“Zuia uporaji wa ardhi,” reads the Swahili headline of a poster on the wall of the community building in Mhaga, a densely populated village in Kisarawe, a district 100km southwest of Dar es Salaam. It means “prevent land grabbing”

UK-based investors are planning a $400 million rural land fund to buy cotton and wheat properties in eastern Australia.

As the global financial downturn pushes investors into finding alternative business ventures, land investment has become an attractive proposition.

"I wonder if greater returns could come for Africa if attention were paid to backing the continent’s millions of smallholders? And yet, as I speak, many are being driven off their land and swelling the ranks of the urban dispossessed."

More than 613,000 hectares of Australia's NSW's agricultural land is owned by UK-based investors, compared with 227,300 ha owned by Korean interests and 55,560 ha by US investors.

The French Development Agency and the UK-based Emergent Asset Management have been named as the leading investors in massive land deals involving African leaders

Synthesis report from the World Agriculture Investment Conference, London, UK, 4-5 October.