Last week, the Land Matrix "land grab" database was released. On paper, they have a strong methodology and strict criteria about projects to be included. In practice, they seem to violate their own rules, at least when it comes to Chinese "projects" in Africa.

A Chinese investment group has reportedly lodged a bid to buy the entire 15,000 hectares of the Ord Expansion Project in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

The price for Alliance’s investigations into cases of land grabbing has been set so high that once paid it will become extremely risky for anyone to question the vices of land grabbing and forceful evictions of innocent citizens.

Liberal MP backs calls from farming groups nationwide to tighten government regulations that scrutinise potential sales of Australian farmland and water assets to foreign investors and increase transparency.

Indigenous people fear collective retaliation by government security forces.

Discussions with EU officials covered various aspects of human rights violations in Ethiopia with a focus on the large-scale land-lease to local and international commercial farmers, the evictions of Oromo farmers from their homes and farmlands, and the situation of Oromo refugees in the Horn of Africa and Yemen.

Investment managers meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York said rising US farmland prices were making it harder to find quality land and high returns, and a lot of capital flow is moving to developing nations.

Gunmen attacked the camp of an agricultural company owned by a Saudi billionaire in southwest Ethiopia, Federal Affairs Minister Shiferaw Teklemariam said.

The global rush to buy farmland continues, and international investors are focusing on the poorest countries with weak land-rights security for deals, according to a report by the Land Matrix research group.

The World Bank and Wall Street firms targeted for African land deals displacing hundreds of thousands.

Exploring the fundamental data flaws in the Land Matrix dataset

The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate is a vast mega-project, a plan for over a million hectares of plantations and industrialised agriculture that threatens the people and environment across the southern part of West Papua. Indonesian and foreign companies have each claimed their share of the land, and offer the local Malind people next-to-nothing in exchange for the forest that has sustained them for countless generations.