South Korea's largest shipbuilder, Hyundai Heavy Industries, announced it will buy a big tract of Russian farmland in the latest move by Korean firms to help their crowded country secure stable food supplies.
The Saudi Cabinet on Monday approved establishing a SR3 billion agricultural investments company that will partner the Saudi private sector in the quest to achieve food security in the Kingdom.
An agricultural investment firm owned by the Saudi government will focus on investing abroad to cultivate mainly wheat, rice, sugar and soybeans, a senior agriculture ministry official said on Monday.
With food prices rising across the globe, adventurous foreign investors can find excellent business opportunities in Ukrainian agricultural sector despite (or perhaps due to?) the global economic crisis.
Jordan will dispatch a delegation to Sudan next Thursday headed by its agriculture minister Saeed Al-Masri to discuss an agreement on developing food farms in the East African country, according to media reports.
Madagascar has “definitely abandoned” a $6 billion farming agreement with Daewoo Logistics Corp., though may welcome agriculture investment in the future, Minister of Land Reform Hajo Andrianainarivelo said.
The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank's private sector lending arm, will nearly double its investment in agribusiness in Africa to $200 million during the 2009 fiscal year, a senior official said.
The agribusiness managed investment scheme sector is not expected to escape the economic downturn that has hit the financial services industry.
People planning to spend their dream holiday lounging on the idyllic palm-lined beaches of the Seychelles might have to look elsewhere after the government decided to make food security a priority over the lucrative tourist sector.
Increasingly, the land deals are coming under the scrutiny of the UN and watchdog groups such as Grain, the International Land Coalition and the IFPRI. That's because it is not obvious that they are win-win situations.
The UN’s food security expert, Olivier de Schutter, has called for a “code of conduct” to regulate the purchase of swathes of farmland across Africa, Asia and Latin America by Gulf states and private companies pursuing agribusiness.
THE overthrow of Madagascar’s president in mid-March was partly caused by water problems — in South Korea.
