The industry boom in the demand for palm oil has come at the high price of rainforest destruction, labour exploitation, and brutal land and water grabbing. The pressure from oil palm plantations has pushed communities in West Borneo on a common struggle to access clean water and continue producing food.

Global inequality experts blame the upward trend of land inequality partly on the increased interest from corporate and financial actors, such as investment funds, in agricultural land investments.

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.

TIAA is unusual among financial firms for its aggressive pursuit of farmland, paving the way for financial wealth controlled by companies and individuals to takeover and dispossess rural communities of their farmland.

New report reveals finance firm TIAA initiated unprecedented global farmland investments under CEO Roger Ferguson Jr., while undermining human rights standards.

The struggles continue for the communities displaced by the Addax Bioenergy project in Sierra Leone and their situation is getting worse as the lands are handed over from one company to the next.

Update report on the Addax land grab in Sierra Leone - originally fuelled by European development banks, then taken over by Sunbird Bioenergy and then by Brown Investment Plc

The fund’s initial offering has raised EUR32.45 million to-date from private investors to back sustainably-managed agricultural land and forests in the Baltic Sea region and Central and Eastern Europe.

As development banks gather for a global summit, organisations condemn the financing of corporate agribusiness and plantations, and call for public investment in agroecology and local food systems to tackle the climate crisis.

Macquarie Group's $300 million takeover bid for a real estate investment trust, which owns vast farms across Australia, could pave the way for more farming deals involving the investment banking powerhouse and the fresh food giant Costa Group.

European MPs issue an interparliamentary statement on the “Finance in common summit”, calling on public development banks to stop "harmful investments", such as those in the oil palm plantation company Feronia in the DR Congo.

American pension fund giant TIAA sold its Southern Riverina farming aggregation between Wagga Wagga and Albury in southern NSW to local Australian farmers after more than a decade of ownership.

Georeferencing — a digital mapping technique employed by South American governments to register land ownership — is being regularly used by landgrabbers and companies to expel traditional communities from ancestral lands.

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.

The Matopiba region is home to the majority of the Cerrado’s remaining vegetation, and, conversely, among the highest deforestation and fire rates in Brazil.

The $56.5 billion Harvard University Endowment Fund is preparing to sell another chunk of its Australian almond and cotton holdings after putting the Western Rosella Farming portfolio in the NSW Riverina on the market.

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.

A new report explores how global finance has transformed land and nature into financial assets, driving violence and environmental destruction.

One of the ugliest features of the modern world is the exploitation of natural resources for private gain. Governments and corporations are eager to convert smallholder farms, grasslands, and forests into monoculture plantations, cattle ranches, and mines. But this only contributes to climate change, environmental degradation, displacement, loss of income and poverty

A real financialisation of land, natural resources and the agri-food system is underway throughout South America. In the context of the multiple global crises, the pressure on the control of land and other resources of interest has increased considerably, either for productive use or as financial assets. To this end, the digitisation of land governance and the georeferencing technology that supports it are serving to disguise a massive digital land grab.

Agricultural investors say the COVID-19 crisis has had little impact on their business and investment intentions, with Australian agricultural land, water and business assets as appealing as ever to investors.

The Feronia case, and other development bank investment failures, shows that there is a need to overhaul development finance institutions practices and to consider whether it might be better to just shut them down entirely.

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.

Nyéléni Newsletter's second edition fo 2020 looks at how land-related struggles have evolved over the past decades, starting with demands for agrarian reform to a more comprehensive framing.

Giant South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group is looking to make an exit from the Warragundi aggregation in Australia, just over a year after taking control of the largest acreages in NSW’s Mudgee region.

Rural Funds Management has announced the sale of its Mooral almond orchard to Boston-based Hancock Agricultural Investment Group

For the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund a minority stake in one of the largest grain traders could boost food security for the United Arab Emirates, amid concerns brought on by disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Israeli and Dutch firms, backed by the Dutch export credit agency, have signed a €108mn deal to construct four agriculture production and training centres across Côte d’Ivoire. The scheme is devised by Green 2000, an Israel-headquartered company that specialises in agriculture projects. It involves the construction of four agriculture services and training centres, which provide land, facilities and machinery for producing fruit, vegetables, fish and other products.

First-ever database reveals true scope of financing of forest-risk commodity companies, amidst global rainforest fires

The Covid-19 pandemic and a general trend towards ESG investing are pushing more institutional investors, particularly pension funds, to look more closely at farmland investments.