Agrifirma, a private investment company backed by financier Lord Rothschild, transferred around half of its assets to a new joint venture with Brazilian private equity firm BRZ Investimentos.

EBRD funds Ukrfarm, a subsidiary of the Renaissance Group, to bring an additional 50,000 hectares of land in the Ukraine into crop production.

Chinese and other eastern investors are looking to buy agriculture land and agribusiness across the globe, and Ukraine is increasingly on their radar.

Africa is bracing for short-term trouble, but sustained high prices could spark agribusiness investment across the continent.

Asian and Middle East buyers want to buy agriculture companies in Ukraine to secure supply of grains and oilseeds, Vienna-based Raiffeisen Investment AG said.

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. Der Spiegel investigates.

Most Chinese investment in African agriculture is concentrated in southern Africa: Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi and, increasingly, Angola.

Los defensores del modelo de poner a producir las tierras desde los gobiernos, inversionistas o grandes corporaciones argumentan que se generan puestos de trabajo, que se hace rendir tierras ociosas y que se producen alimentos. Pero en ese análisis falta el principal elemento. La pobreza en el mundo reside en el campo, precisamente por modelos como éste.

“Foreigners who come here get astonished at the gleaming black earth,” said Viktor Karnushin, head of a local subsidiary of Sweden’s Black Earth Farming corporation, one of the biggest foreign players in Russian farming.

Investors are plowing money into Russia’s open lands to resuscitate the long-neglected farm sector and supply a world in ever greater need of food.

“Look at the colour, what a beautiful crop,” says Richard Spinks, pointing to wheat and rapeseed fields that his company sowed this season in western Ukraine. “If all of Ukraine’s farms could produce the yields we are getting, this country could play a big role in feeding the world and establish itself as a geopolitical power,” says the British chief executive of London-listed Landkom.

The expectation in Ukraine is that billions of dollars of fresh investment and agriculture reforms, namely sanctioning of agriculture land sales, could double or triple domestic grain production to 100-150 million tons levels in the long term.