Karuturi, which has 300,000 ha in Ethiopia, is now targeting the DRC, Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

There are unconfirmed reports that former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke is representing a Shanghai-based company wanting to farm all 15,000 hectares of the land being developed as part of the Ord irrigation project in Western Australia.

Los Grobo plans to expand its cultivation in Brazil to 90,000 hectares in the 2012/13 crop year from 60,000 hectares today.

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, with an estimated $100 billion in assets, expects to start exports of grains and wool from Australia as it nears completion of a $486 million farm investment plan

New Mexico State Investment Council will consider approving investment policies for a farmland suballocation, potentially in emerging markets, in its 10% long-term real asset portfolio.

SLC Agricola, the Brazil farm operator with large ambitions in farmland acquisition, sealed a $239m cash injection from UK fund manager Valiance Asset Management for a business aimed at turning scrub into "high-quality" farms.

China would invest billions of dollars to transform vast tracts of undeveloped land in northern Australia for farming, under a plan confirmed yesterday by the federal government.

The distinctive feature of these land deals that has attracted attention is the speed of the acquisitions, the transparency (lack thereof) of the terms and the scale of the acquisitions and implied investment.

The PRI for Farmland are supposed to an opportunity for communities and CSOs to assess the performance of investors in farmland against a set of voluntary standards, but fall short of what’s needed to hold companies properly to account.

The Chinese Government is seeking less scrutiny of its Australian farm raids. Sources say the Chinese are pushing the issue as part of a planned free trade agreement with Australia.

Trilogy Capital is involved in a large scale agriculture project in Ethiopia with US-based Morrell Agro Industries.

Herakles Farms plans to clear and replace 300 square miles of virgin rainforest with mono-culture trees to establish an oil palm plantation, with major impacts on 52,000 Indigenous peoples in 88 villages who depend on the forest.