Everyone seems to agree on the need for “investment” in agriculture to fight hunger and support rural development, but the focus is exclusively on investment funds and big business, and nothing about farmers. Is the term part of a disinformation campaign to serve the interests of only a few?
The Government of Uganda has been asked by Members of Parliament to make the process of acquiring land for investments more transparent.
Investors are honing the focus of their cash on real assets including farmland, timber, mines and energy projects, which are less correlated to financial markets.
The Obama model's first project in Mozambique will be to support Cargill, the giant grain trader and largest private company in the world, to take 40,000 hectares of farmland.
With communal land associations communities will be having one voice and if anybody, be it government or investor, is interested in their land, that person is made aware of that the group is organized and therefore not easy to simply deploy graders to start tiling or clearing the land.
A massive land grab has occurred in Papua New Guinea under the auspices of the Special Agricultural and Business Leases scheme, and the impact on communities across the country has been devastating. Greenpeace has produced a new report that details the extent of the damage.
There's growing interest in who invests in Australian companies and who buys Australian land, with more discussion around the topic of global food security.
Indigenous peoples in Sarawak, Malaysia are facing an escalation of land grabbing in their territories by national palm oil companies, backed by foreign corporations.
Villagers in Mozambique are caught between their government's need to promote agricultural development through foreign investment and to protect the rights of the citizens who depend on that land.
A Chinese property conglomerate is bidding for a 15,000 hectare farming project in the Australian outback as Canberra looks to open the remote north for farming to tap booming demand for food from Asia, especially China.
Investors from Canada and the Netherlands have almost half of all foreign forest and farmland holdings in the USA. The Canadian holdings reflect investment by timber companies, while the Dutch holdings reflect pension fund investments.
Cambodia is a microcosm of a violent struggle playing out across the globe for control of a shrinking – and therefore increasingly valuable – pool of natural resources.