Until last year, people in the Ethiopian settlement of Elliah earned a living by farming their land and fishing. Now, they are employees.

"This apparent rush to lease so much farmland, much or all of it to foreign interests, during a time of worsening food insecurity should raise concern within the donor community about GoE motivations and negotiating capacity," writes the US embassy in Addis Ababa in December 2009

Agribusiness and global investors are scooping up farmland. Are corporate farmers the new colonialists? asks BusinessWeek

There’s a whole school of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re unprofitable.

Area nearly the size of France purchased, leased for food production around the world Africa, South America, parts of Europe targeted by cash-rich, food-poor nations

The fervour with which foreign commercial interests are forcing their agricultural 'solutions' on the African continent represents nothing more than an established endeavour to protect profits and access to resources.

Today's emerging new farm owners are private equity fund managers, specialised farmland fund operators, hedge funds, pension funds, big banks and the like.

Head of global investment strategy at HSBC Private Bank says: 'I wouldn’t use the expression land grab. But I would say this is very much something you would invest in on a minimum 10-year horizon.'

In the Philippines, a land lease hotspot like Cambodia or Laos, a series of high-profile deals has clashed with long-running demands for agrarian reform including land redistribution.

An internal document recently posted on IRRI's website reveals that the Institute has been advising Saudi Arabia in the context of its strategy to acquire farm land overseas for its own food production.

Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, a Boston-based unit of Toronto's Manulife Financial Corp., decided its first Canadian purchase would be an 1,100-acre (450-hectare) patch of land that it called "one of the most highly productive properties in the industry." The company will not disclose how much it paid, or even the exact location of the farm. But president Jeff Conrad said the company is in Canada to stay, and the fund plans to seek more land.

Islamabad instead of allowing foreigners control of local agri-land should use twenty million acres of government land to settle 2 million families by allotting ten acres land to each family

If the moratorium on agricultural land sale is lifted, rich multinational corporations will buy and it will be legislatively impossible to strip them of lands that could be used for feeding Ukrainians.

A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. Der Spiegel investigates.

There may emerge a situation when Ukrainians will be starving in spite of having the most fertile black earth.

Rabobank announces that more than 90 investment funds have emerged that are investing directly in overseas farmland.

The water industry and agriculture are emerging as major new asset classes for Islamic financial institutions, especially in the field of sustainable investments.

As world population expands, the demand for arable land should soar. At least that's what George Soros, Lord Rothschild, and other investors believe.

High on Chongqing's shopping list is more than 333,000 hectares of farmland, which Huang said would reduce the city's dependence, for example, on imported edible oil.

More important is for Africa to realise its own potential for food production, which would in the long-term negate the need for these deals.

Mohammed Mbwana, who farms in the Tana River delta area and is an official of a local NGO, said the Qatar agreement would displace thousands of locals. At least 150,000 families in farming and pastoralist communities depend on the land in question, said to be part of Kenya’s biggest wetland.

Private equity used to stay away from anything to do with agriculture, put off by the uncontrollable risks of bad climate and natural disasters. And yet in the last three years some big funds have been launched in the agribusiness space, and they are busy trying different ways of mitigating the risks.

So does this mean farming might now be a good place to make money? Some investors certainly think so, according to ETF Securities.

The agribusiness managed investment scheme sector is not expected to escape the economic downturn that has hit the financial services industry.

Eric Sprott's hunger for commodities may have wavered since last year's price collapse took a hefty strip off revenues at Sprott Inc., his money-management business. However, the legendary hedge-fund manager is still placing bets on at least one commodity: grain.

Agrifirma Brazil, a farm fund backed by Lord Rothschild and Jim Slater, the former corporate raider, is scrapping its hedge fund-style fees to make it easier to attract investors. Agrifirma owns more than 100,000 acres of Brazilian farmland.

“We have a land fund in South America, we have in Ukraine. Now we are developing one in Africa. We need to acquire land for farming,” says Guy de Montule, Louis Dreyfus’ chief executive officer for Middle East and Africa

First cargo of rice arrives in oil-rich kingdom amid mixed feelings over business ethics.

"We are seeing a land grab bigger than anywhere else in the world, and it has attracted a mighty cast of characters," says Kingsmill Bond, chief strategist at Troika Dialog, a Moscow brokerage firm.