Researchers find control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings.

Indonesia is the world's largest exporter of palm oil, and Papua is its newest frontier. A visual investigation suggests fires have been deliberately set on the land by Korean palm oil giant that has been buying up swathes of Asia's largest remaining rainforests for their plantations.

The project 3,000 ha seed breeding project in Mazowe will produce seedlings for local farmers to grow apples, grapes, bananas, peaches and pears under contract farming.

Nicaragua has ramped up export production to the US amid the pandemic. But this has come at a high cost for Indigenous communities, who are being run off their land to make way for cattle ranches.

Harvard University’s endowment spun off its natural resources team, creating an independent entity that will manage some of the school’s agriculture and food production investments.

An Associated Press investigation found poor conditions of millions of laborers from some of the poorest corners of Asia across palm oil plantation in Malaysia and Indonesia, many of them enduring various forms of exploitation, with the most serious abuses including child labor, outright slavery and allegations of rape.

Thousands of families are being violently evicted from their farms to make way for foreign-owned plantations in Kiryandongo, Uganda.

In Sri Lanka, where the state formally owns an estimated 85 percent of the country’s 6.6 million hectares of land, there is legitimate concern that the proposed US-funded project, the MCC compact would shift control of these lands towards private interests.

On the occasion of International Indigenous Peoples Day August 9, Arkilaus Kladit, a member of the Knasaimos-Tehit people in West Papua Province, Indonesia, writes about the importance of his tribe’s customary forests and the fight to protect it from logging and palm oil.

An investigation is carried out into whether Singapore-based agribusiness giant Olam deforested more than 25,000 hectares (62,000 acres), in contravention of sustainability criteria it had signed up to, in order to develop oil palm plantations in Gabon.

Le tribunal civil de Bangkok a accordé à plus de 700 familles cambodgiennes le droit de se joindre à une action collective contre Mitr Phol, le plus grand producteur de sucre de Thaïlande, dont les activités au Cambodge ont conduit à l’expulsion forcée de familles en 2008 et 2009.

Reportage de Mongabay sur le conflit autour de la Socaplam au Cameroun

The firm Adecoagro, the largest producer of raw milk in Argentina, received a loan of US $ 100 million weeks ago from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which will be used to make investments in the local agri-food sector.

SMTP created BoViMa in 2014 with the ambition of capturing the regional market, supplying beef to islands in the Western Indian Ocean. Its plans remained in cold storage for years. In 2017, the IFC stepped in.

As the world concentrates on dealing with COVID-19 pandemic, multinational companies continue to evict communities from their land, tearing down their lives and their sovereignty to plant monocrops like oil palm and sugar cane in Africa, or GMO soy in South America.

A new wave of alleged environmental and human rights abuses by Wilmar, Socfin and others sees renewed calls for action

While palm oil companies present themselves as benevolent donors during the pandemic, communities living in and around these plantations tell another story.

Activists have called for a financial probe into the Korindo Group, a conglomerate that paid a $22 million “consultancy fee” for the permits to expand its oil palm operations in Indonesia’s Papua province.

The massive Socfin oil palm plantation operation is one of post-war Sierra Leone’s biggest investments and one of its most controversial.

People's Coalition on Food Sovereignty, GRAIN, and Ponlok Khmer urged the government of Cambodia to return disputed land from Chinese company Hengfu Group Sugar Industry to the Khmer and Indigenous Kuy communities. The groups expressed solidarity with the Indigenous Kuy people who continue to assert their legitimate land rights even amid the global health crisis.

Peasants living in Jambi province, Indonesia, were in for a shock when the police arrested Junawal, a local peasant leader and organiser on May 26, 2020. Junawal was leading the local resistance against a subsidiary of Royal Lestari Utama (RLU), a joint venture company between PT Barito Pasifik and French transnational tyre-manufacturing giant Michelin that manages more than 88,000 hectares of plantation land in Jambi and East Kalimantan.

On June 6 protesters expressed demands, including a ban on leasing land to foreign companies and the release of political prisoners, such as Max Bokaev, who was imprisoned for peacefully protesting proposed land code amendments.

Indonesia sits at the heart of the global palm oil trade. In 2002, one company PT Erasakti Wira Forestama (EWF) offered villagers in Batanghari, Jambi province a one-time payment for their land. Peatlands were converted to plantations — and the repercussions of the decision are still felt today. Some villager

Companies are seeking to press ahead with investments on community lands or even take advantage of the pandemic to avoid the usual authorization requirements

L’Initiative pour un devoir de vigilance constate une fois de plus que l’autorégulation par les entreprises ne fonctionne pas, et réitère son appel au gouvernement luxembourgeois à adopter une loi sur le devoir de vigilance afin de garantir que les entreprises domiciliées au Luxembourg respectent les droits humains et l’environnement tout au long de la chaîne de valeur.

On the eve of their shareholder meetings, more than 40 organisations sign a collective statement about the situation in numerous rubber and oil palm plantations run by the Socfin group, with the financial participation of the Bolloré group

In response to resistance from people’s movements, Sri Lanka has pulled out of MCC agreement, which would have opened the door for commercial agriculture and large scale acquisition of Sri Lankan lands for foreign individuals and corporations.

The pandemic has opened an opportunity for activities such as illegal logging and land grabs across Asia-Pacific because of less oversight and accountability.

Human Rights Watch found that DFID's CDC Group failed to ensure that the palm oil companies it finances in the DR Congo respects the basic rights of the people who work and live on or near its plantations.

A law to privatise farmland, ultimately for the benefit of global finance and agribusiness, was pushed through Parliament under pressure from the IMF in the context of the coronavirus crisis.