A unit of China’s Shanghai Pengxin Group Co. bought a controlling stake in Brazil’s soybean trader and biodiesel maker Fiagril Ltda for $286 million, marking the first major Chinese acquisition of an agricultural company in Brazil.

The private farming company, Sewa Farm, will start rice farming between June and July this year in Turma Bum in Bonthe district on an initial 25,000 hectares.

The suitors led by Shanghai Pengxin Group will instead work on a new structure for the takeover of S. Kidman & Co., while sticking with the same price tag for the 117-year-old cattle company.

The government has given Ke-Hong Group 2,500 acres for a multi-billion shilling project involving rice farming, poultry, horticulture, and fish farming, according to agriculture minister Tress Bucyanayandi.

An Ethiopian court has handed down a nine-year jail sentence to a leading dissident from the restive region where the government has leased vast tracts of land to foreign investors.

Ministers approved the sale of a New Zealand farm to a Panamanian firm whose treasurer was also a director of a company that Portugal believed laundered money for former Brazilian and Portuguese national soccer coach Luiz Felipe Scolari.

The largest agricultural investment under the federal government's new significant investment visa (SIV) program has been made in the $174 million float candidate Mort & Co, which owns and operates Australia's biggest independent feedlot business.

Land rights campaigners and environmentalists are facing growing violence and intimidation in Brazil, with at least six activists killed so far this year

The protests were sparked by opposition to a legal overhaul that will allow the government to sell farmland to joint ventures, provided they are controlled by Kazakh residents, and lease it to foreigners for up to 25 years. Opponents of the new law, who staged their first protest in the city of Atyrau last Sunday, see the change as a threat to national security, especially after the government announced several agreements with neighboring China for agricultural projects.

After close to three years and many court cases in Nairobi and Nakuru, the curtains appear to be coming down on one of the world’s biggest players in the cut flower industry — Karuturi Limited — after its owners conceded to an application to wind it up.

The company, which has most recently bulldozed the local community's sago palms, is a subsidiary of RSPO member Goodhope Asia Holdings, registered in Singapore and owned by Carson Cumberbatch PLC of Sri Lanka.

The Overseas Investment Office has re-opened its review of the sale of Taranaki farmland to foreign investors after revelations the Argentinian owners were prosecuted for pollution and discharging toxic chemicals into a river in Buenos Aires.