US

Some Iowans believe the greater threat to US farmland is not China but big-money investors — from capital investment funds to tech billionaires, sports celebrities and churches — that are pushing ownership out of reach of Iowa farmers.

Lord Leverhulme’s 1911 concession in the Congo, is now held by an African-run New York-based private equity firm with strong links to global philanthropy.

He urged them to take advantage of their status and position in the community to regularly communicate government policies and programmes to their people, mobilize support for new investments, and act as mediators where required to ensure peaceful co-existence between businesses and communities.

This LDPI Working Paper Series includes work in progress presented at the 2024 Global Land Grabbing Conference in Bogotá, addressing urgent challenges related to land, water, and natural resource grabbing.

This new white paper titled The Evolution of Farmland as an Asset, released by Steve Bruere, president, Peoples Company, and Ailie C. Elmore, instructor, University of Illinois, takes you behind the curtain, not only recounting the history of farmland investment, but examining why events occurred, and how those events drove, and are continuing to drive, the development of a promising and worthy asset class.

Steve Dyer is executive director of Semper Fund Management, a $100M company that was founded in 2019 with partner Ciro Echesortu, former CEO of Louis Dreyfus Company, to seize the unique opportunity in US farmland investment.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan portfolio now includes 130,000 acres of agricultural land globally, from apple orchards to row crop farmland and aquaculture assets, in Australia, Chile, Canada, the US and Portugal

The manner in which African Agriculture acquired rights to operate within the Ndiael Reserve has raised eyebrows. Local herders, whose livelihoods depend on the reserve’s resources, now face displacement and restricted access to water and grazing lands.

The Butler Valley leases terminated by Arizona's governor only amount to about one quarter of Fondomonte’s total farm holdings in Arizona prior to October. Besides the 3500 acres that the company leased from the state, it privately controls almost 10,000 acres more further south and closer to Vicksburg.

Foreign ownership of American land has gained a lot of buzz lately, but senior staff attorney and professor with the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Fran Miller says more attention should go to domestic corporate ownership.

Los Angeles-based Aliment Capital has invested in US-based, Agrovision which has large-scale berry and grape plantations in Peru, Mexico, Morocco and the US.

In Kenya’s lush Thika region, stealing pineapples is a de facto capital crime. At least nine men have allegedly been killed by security guards employed by Del Monte, the world’s largest producer of pineapples.