The government allocated some 350.000 hectares to Sime Darby, a Malaysian multinational. But people only came to know about this deal when the company showed up to take their land.

For all the willing buyers seeking tracts of Australian farm land, local investors are not among them. They wonder what all the fuss is about.

Continued economic uncertainties are prompting a back-to-the-land movement among investors. And a favored choice of land is farmland.

Oil palm giant, Wilmar Nigeria Limited, and the Rainforest Resource and Development Centre (RRDC), an environmental rights group, are currently at logger heads over a massive land grab in a rural community in Cross River State, Southern Nigeria.

Africa is regarded as the New Eldorado, and is attracting many foreign based private or public investment companies, sovereign wealth funds and even pension funds gradually. Sadly, while foreigners continue to play a major role in growth investments, African pension funds' contributions to this growth are dismal.

Agco Corp. (AGCO), the world’s third- largest farm-equipment maker, plans to invest $100 million in Africa over the next three years to capitalize on an agricultural boom and a shift to commercial farming.

US food giant Bunge has been implicated in a sugarcane scandal in Brazil that has kept an entire indigenous community off its land, polluted streams and inflicted illness and death on Guarani Indians.

Dubai-based AWGAL Investments is in advanced talks with farmers in Texas to invest in cattle farms to produce Halal-certified US beef for the GCC and MENA region.

Oxfam’s Phil Bloomer reports on the shocking scandal of (mostly) secretive land-grabbing, usually from those least able to defend their rights.

Chinese property development conglomerate Shanghai Zhongfu has won the sole right to develop 15,200ha of high-value irrigated agricultural land in northern Australia..

Adecoagro, the South American farm operator backed by George Soros and Dwight Anderson, said that growth in the value of its huge land portfolio slowed to 5.6%, fuelling concerns over the impact of Argentine curbs on foreign investors.

A new study puts "land-grab" deals into the context of agricultural investments more generally.