On the evening of April 24, following a daylong rally against large-scale land investment deals in poor nations, the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan became the venue for a 30-minute light show against land grabs in Africa.

Some 33 percent of pollsters voted that family offices were showing the greatest appetite for the asset class, while 31 percent pointed to institutional investor demand.

Ukraine's newly appoined Minister of the Economy has managed money-losing funds for years as partner of agribusiness investor East Capital, but he never presided over anything as hopeless as the Ukrainian economy.

The PHC oil palm plantations provide 100 years of lessons about the failures of agricultural, financial and governance systems in a globalized world.

Veripath Farmland Partners has brought its total acreage under management to approximately 120,000 acres through its latest acquisition of 1,246 acres of farmland in the Province of Alberta.

As with timberland, while direct ownership and management (i.e., being a farmer), is a possibility, such a route is similarly fraught with difficulties. One of the most significant of these is the issue of diversification in the farmland itself - especially with a single investment. A well-diversified holding of farmland (row crop, permanent crop, pasture and even timber) will, therefore, not only require a significant investment, but may also involve land holdings in a number of different locations.

Brookfield will invest in Brazilian properties primarily comprised of pasture land that may be converted to higher-and-better uses, including soybean, corn and sugarcane production

The global financial crisis may have hit tax-effective agribusiness schemes hard, but the prospects of the small group of companies that survived are anything but gloomy. "We're actually tapping into the new GFC, which is the global food crisis," says Wayne Overall, executive director of agribusiness managed investment scheme operator Almond Investors Limited

There is growing interest from international investors in the New Zealand agricultural sector, particularly from wealthy Europeans, boutique funds manager Mint Asset Management says.

Investors have turned to farmland as part of a sweeping push into physical assets — everything from lumber, hotels and apartments to parking meters, bridges and highways.

A group of private Saudi investors said they plan to start a company with $533.3 million capital that will invest in farm projects mainly abroad. First projects may be with Ghana, Turkey and Kazakhstan.

En Amérique latine, comme partout ailleurs dans le monde, les communautés subissent actuellement une nouvelle forme d’invasion de leur territoire.

Protestors have been demonstrating in Geneva against the growth in investments in agriculture that they say endangers food security in many developing countries.

Corporate agriculture is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be before its limits are reached?

"During my research trips in Africa, I came across posters against the land grab deals," Liberti told IPS. "One said: ‘Future generations will damn your graves, because you did not leave them any land.’"

MetLife Inc, the largest US life insurer, started a business to make agricultural loans in Brazil as insurers expand in developing markets and seek investments to boost income with interest rates near record lows.

Joe Azelby, JP Morgan’s head of Global Real Assets, is seeing a structural shift in many institutional portfolios toward real assets, including farmland.

Let us focus on the real issue that our legislators should be grasping: how do we keep farmers operating and attract farmers to own the land they work, and not become peasants on land rented from institutional investors, domestic or foreign.

Farmland deserves special attention because it involves much more than just land: the people who own and work the land form the basis of rural communities.

Milltrust has a 10 year, billion dollar program to establish farms in the southern hemisphere to produce rice, wheat, corn and barley, as well as new cash crops that will provide feedstock for animals.

The real threat to our food security, according to researchers, is broader corporate ownership and consolidation of American farmland — including by domestic investors.

En partenariat avec 17 organisations de Harvard et du monde entier, la Coalition Stop Harvard Land Grabs tente de mettre fin aux investissements réalisés par l’Université dans les ressources naturelles et exige des solutions régénératrices aux dommages causés par ces exploitations.

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.

Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories

An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens

As controversy continues to bubble in Australia over the latest big local farmland buy-up and what it means for food production, it’s worth looking to see where these foreign raiders are coming from, who’s backing them and how other countries are tightening their regulations to stop them.

Since Jane Mendillo took over the endowment in July 2008, Harvard’s holdings of forests, farms and other natural resources in Brazil as well as in New Zealand and Romania have grown to about 10 percent of the portfolio -- more than $3 billion -- and she wants to add more.

Protesters paid a visit to TIAA’s New York headquarters Thursday, urging the firm to stop investing in farmland and companies with ties to palm oil.

GRAIN recently learned that several cases of land grabbing have been prosecuted in the courts, or been acted upon by national authorities, and so we have compiled a short update on these developments.

With fires on their Cerrado properties, Harvard’s and TIAA’s deforestation exposure appears to be growing.