"Finance Minister Yousef Hussein Kamal said he had personally been traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Sudan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere to look into investing in agricultural production for the Qatari market," reports the US Embassy in Doha about a visit from US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

Hostility to foreign investment in a sensitive border area has forced the Turkish government to shelve plans to turn a minefield along its frontier with Syria into organic farmland.

Slater reckons shortages of soft commodities and the likelihood of rising inflation make farmland an excellent investment, not least in Brazil where Agrifirma is located.

Alarmed by exporters’ trade restrictions, food importing countries have realised that their dependence on the agricultural market makes them vulnerable not only to a surge in prices but, more crucially, to an interruption in supplies.

Land grabbing and food speculation are not just overseas phenomena; they are also happening in North America.

The European Union is coercing some West African governments into allowing European-based fishing companies to deplete West Africa’s fishing stocks in a new "food colonialism" that is now taking place between rich and poor countries around the world, according to British author George Monbiot.

More than 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa and Latin America are now in the hands of foreign governments and companies, a sign of a global "land grab" that got a boost from last year's food crisis.

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.

Neo-colonialists are buying up agricultural land in Africa – and local farmers could be crushed unless there are international rules to protect them.

Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.

Food-importing nations from South Korea to Saudi Arabia may step up purchases or leases of overseas farmland to lock in supplies amid concern prices may again surge. “We’re going to see more of this, especially from countries that are quite dependent on imports,” Brady Sidwell, head of advisory at Rabobank Groep NV’s Northeast Asia Food & Agribusiness Research and Advisory Group, said in a Bloomberg Television interview broadcast today.

The problem of food security poses a real threat to global stability. Meeting in Italy last weekend, agriculture ministers of the G8 industrialized countries recognized the extent of the problem. They pledged to continue fighting hunger. But beyond calling for increased public and private investment in agriculture, the final communiqué of the ministerial meeting was short on fresh proposals.

“We are looking at the food sector, financial services, telecommunications, hospitality and transport,” Zain said, adding the firm was aiming to buy minority stakes that would give it “some extent of control”.

Deposed President Marc Ravalomanana brought the house of Madagascar down upon himself. But he has been replaced by a young untested leader who, although he has some public support, is full of himself and clearly contemptuous of democratic institutions. The result is that investment in Madagascar, and perhaps across the continent, will be hurt, writes Stephen Hayes

Saudi Arabia has announced the arrival of the first food crop harvested in Saudi-owned farms abroad, in a sign that the kingdom is moving faster than expected to outsource agricultural production.

Big purchases of African land by richer countries in a drive for food security could fuel unrest if the rights of local farmers are not taken into consideration, a land rights campaigner warned on Wednesday.

Chinese companies are lining up to invest in African agriculture, but governments like Senegal must do more to limit the risks for investors, a veteran Chinese investor said.

Gulf governments, entrepreneurs and sovereign wealth funds have spent vast sums buying or leasing farmland across Asia and Africa to try to secure cheaper imports and keep supermarket prices low. But the World Bank and UN want them to put more money into development aid.

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.

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.

Tenant farming was popular in rural America until the Dust Bowl years of the Depression, but the practice is making a comeback on an epic scale in much of Africa.

In the past week, the alleged claim by Egypt’s Agriculture minister Amin Abaza that Uganda offered his country over 2 million acres of fertile land to produce wheat to feed the Arab nation’s 81 million people has rattled Ugandans.

A Kuwaiti delegation last week met with the Myanmar cabinet and industry officials to discuss investment in the agricultural sector.

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization is expanding its Abu Dhabi office tenfold to broker deals with farmers in such areas as the Horn of Africa.

The Dubai-based think-tank Gulf Research Centre, in its food inflation report released last month, noted that agriculture production in the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) countries is on the decline, and its exposure to unstable global food supplies would increase in the future. It called on the GCC to develop links with countries rich in arable land.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is in talks with Sudan and other countries to grow grains to meet its strategic food needs.

Inflation and the spectre of long-term food shortages have prompted the UAE Government to consider a new strategic investment – the purchase of large-scale farms in Pakistan and other countries.

Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots as they bet on rising food prices by buying farms.