Lured by soaring food prices, corporations - both domestic and foreign - have been snapping up land in this fertile region the size of France, replacing inefficient Soviet-style collective farming with modern farming techniques and economies of scale.

“Foreigners who come here get astonished at the gleaming black earth,” said Viktor Karnushin, head of a local subsidiary of Sweden’s Black Earth Farming corporation, one of the biggest foreign players in Russian farming.

"In a wide-ranging conversation, Sudanese business magnate Osama Daoud outlined a project to gradually develop as much as 1.26 million acres in northern Sudan for agricultural production," reports the US Embassy in Khartoum

As with timberland, while direct ownership and management (i.e., being a farmer), is a possibility, such a route is similarly fraught with difficulties. One of the most significant of these is the issue of diversification in the farmland itself - especially with a single investment. A well-diversified holding of farmland (row crop, permanent crop, pasture and even timber) will, therefore, not only require a significant investment, but may also involve land holdings in a number of different locations.

Saudi Arabia is interested in investment in grain and cattle-breeding in Kazakhstan, said agency reports referring to the press service of Akmola oblast akim.

The largest fund to invest in European farmland will be launched today, signalling investors' growing appetite for alternative ways to profit from a long-term rise in agricultural commodity demand and prices. The farmland fund, set up by Germany-based Palmer Capital Partners and UK-based Bidwells, is expected to raise about €300m ($425m) to buy arable land in Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic. It will also invest in western Europe.

The fund will invest 70 percent of its money in agricultural companies that make fertilizers, forest products or biofuels. Commodities such as corn and soybeans will account for 15 percent, with the remainder in farmland.

Pakistan’s minister for privatization and investment, at a recently held forum in Dubai, announced that Pakistan was willing to provide land with 100 per cent ownership rights and that the buyers would be free in importing the agri-produce to their country as well.

The Indian government is considering a proposal to enable banks and financial institutions to finance acquisition of farm land overseas for cultivation of pulses and oilseeds.

There is Korean land in Argentina: 20,894 hectares of pampas some 1,000 km northwest of the capital Buenos Aires. The Korean government bought the land in 1978 for US$2,115,000, but it has remained neglected for about 30 years.

Chinese investment in Africa is expanding beyond a race to secure minerals and energy sources to put an increasing focus on agriculture, the chief executive of Standard Chartered Bank said on Wednesday.

As Mideast investors make plans to pump cash into farm projects in the developing world, the head of the United Nations' food agency said he is discouraging them from making direct purchases of farmland to avoid local backlash or other controversy, which could cause the investment trend to dry up.