Nomadic herders, rarely a priority for governments, are being dispossessed by bioethanol developments in Kenya, says Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition (ILC), and they also depend on the “unused” land that Madagascar offered Daewoo.

Sauf secret bien gardé, c’est à ce jour la plus importante transaction du genre : la Corée du Sud vient de révéler qu’elle va louer 1,3 million d’hectares de terre à ­l’État malgache.

The Kenyan President, Mwai Kibaki, returned from a visit to Qatar on Monday. His spokesman said the request for land in the Tana River delta, south of Lamu, was being seriously considered. “Nothing comes for free. If you want people to invest in your country then you have to make concessions,” the spokesman said.

Africa could be the breadbasket for the GCC, providing valuable water and food supplies to the entire region, a Bahraini expert claimed yesterday.

Dernières nouvelles de la mondialisation : la société sud-coréenne Daewoo Logistics négocie avec le gouvernement de Madagascar la location, pour quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ans, de quelque 1,3 million d'hectares de terres agricoles. Soit un quarante-cinquième de la superficie de l'île : comme si la France accordait pour un siècle à un investisseur étranger la libre disposition de deux de ses départements...

Qatar has asked Kenya to lease it 40,000 hectares of land to grow crops as part of a proposed package that would also see the Gulf state fund a new £2.4bn port on the popular tourist island of Lamu off the east African country.

Investment opportunities between Africa and the GCC are ripe for the picking, says a top government official.

Backed by their governments and bankrolled with huge trade and investment profits and budget surpluses, the newly emerging neo-colonial economic powers are seizing control of vast tracts of fertile lands from poor countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, through the intermediation of local corrupt, free-market regimes.

The stalled Jordanian agricultural megaproject in Sudan is expected to be resumed at the beginning of 2009

We had a meeting today on alternative investment vehicles and discussed hard assets. One of the topics was farmland. There’s lots of movement in this space. South Korea just leased more than 1 million hectares in Madagascar for 99 years. Abu Dhabi has publicly announced intent to invest in around 500,000 hectares. This could be an agrarian ace in the hand for the Philippines.

After a phone talk with one of my sources, I discovered that the branch office of Daewoo Logistics had nothing to do with it. Actually, the company which has dealt with this land matter was a Malagasy incorporated company: Madagascar Future Entreprise.

As the Caribbean and the rest of the world are still grappling with the global food crisis, Guyana is seeking to sell its vast land and water resources to United States investors as an area suitable for agriculture and aquaculture investment.