PSP

In a rare move, Australia’s largest agricultural landholder by value, the mammoth Canadian pension fund PSP, has listed a significant cropping aggregation in southern Queensland for sale.

There is an increasing demand for nature-based solutions and real assets are of particular interest to institutional asset owners. But just because something is a natural investment does not always mean it is good for the environment. Or that it is a good investment.

For more than a century, corporations have controlled the Hawaiian island’s water. That could be changing.

Global institutional investors, led by Canadian pension funds, are piling into the sector, a trend mirroring growing allocations to the farming and related rural sectors worldwide.

Qantas Super plans to generate a higher proportion of returns from the agricultural sector after committing $200 million to the development of high-yielding horticultural crops on properties managed by farmland investor goFARM.

Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), the largest foreign institutional investor in Australian agriculture, has acquired more than 8,000 hectares of farmland in New South Wales from Duxton Farms for A$70m.

Canada's public worker pension fund manager PSP Investments has made a significant stride in Australia's agricultural sector by acquiring a majority stake in Ellerslie Free Range Farms, a leading egg producer, for $180 million.

Le régime de retraite des fonctionnaires fédéraux canadiens a acheté une ancienne plantation de canne à sucre à Maui. Mais des habitants et des militants écologistes protestent contre cette présence étrangère qui accapare l’eau de l’île pour faire pousser des agrumes.

Over the last three years, Australia’s agriculture and farmland have been in high demand for institutional investors in Canada searching for diversification and sustainability.

Financial players are moving aggressively to snatch up lands around the world with access to water for irrigation. Their strategy is to pump as much water as they can and as fast as they can into the production of crops that reap high prices in export markets.

Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California's scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink

The undertaking will be carried out alongside PSP Investments’ local operating partners on more than 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of farmland and timberland.