Farmers want register of overseas buyers of Oz farmland & water licences
- ABC
- 16 November 2010
New South Wales Farmers Association is calling for a register of all overseas purchases of Australian agricultural land and water licenses.
New South Wales Farmers Association is calling for a register of all overseas purchases of Australian agricultural land and water licenses.
More than $9 billion of prized agricultural assets have been sold to offshore interests in the past two years alone.
Fears that faceless corporations and international investors would become the new barons of the Australian bush have proved to be unfounded
Wilmar is eyeing Indonesia's Papua Province for a massive cane growing project.
Australians are in danger of becoming servants, not masters, of their own food resources.
Mr Verghese says that Olam sees "sustainable value" in investing in agriculture, including farmland, and that GM crops are an inevitable "must".
The anxiety expressed in some farming quarters and the daily media about Australian farms becoming dominated by foreign corporations and governments fails to recognise that the coming and going of overseas investors has always been part of rural property transactions.
Emirates Investments Group is looking to buy food and agricultural assets in Australia and New Zealand as global demand climbs, CEO Raza Jafar said.
In an era when many countries are starting to worry about food security, foreign agribusiness might buy into the rural water market here in Australia and use permanent water holdings to dictate how our farmland should be used.
Galtere, a New York fund manager, said it was raising $1 billion to invest in production facilities for agricultural commodities -- including arable farmlands in countries such as Australia, Brazil and Uruguay -- that it planned to later sell or list publicly.
An inquiry into food production in Australia has recommended an audit of foreign-owned agricultural land and water
Australian Liberal senator Bill Heffernan warns that sovereign wealth funds need to be watched because some were "already acquiring other sovereigns' wealth to protect their own food security tasks".