While we welcome the Financial Times' mention of our report on TIAA’s investments in Brazil, we are disappointed that the article quotes from an email by TIAA dismissing the allegations in our report as “inaccurate and without merit” without providing grounds for such claims.

The public debate about the ethics of investing in farmland is being ignored by serious investors who seem to have had no qualms about buying up large tracts of land in Africa reports the Financial Times.

The mad scramble for Africa. Critics say the financial firms that helped cause the global recession by inflating the real estate bubble -- are back. And this time they're being accused of pulling the same tricks with the world's food supply.

Ram Karuturi says he is targeting to acquire up to a million hectares of land in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa to build an integrated global agri-product company.

Such huge transfers of agricultural power must surely come with consequences that are worthy of closer regulatory inspection.

Leopard Capital's second Cambodian fund is expected to continue investment in agriculture, as well as potentially including investment in Laos.

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

Carbon credit schemes are not just flawed as climate solutions; they have perpetrated devastating human rights abuses and land grabs.

A mediation process is unlikely to address long-lasting tensions and tenure issues that arise when ‘development’ projects on public lands take over large tracts of ancestral land

Land prices have increased dramatically and despite a moratorium on foreign land purchasing, foreign entities have found a way to buy land. Polish farmers are despairing and protesting en masse.

There are countless examples of governments handing it over at bargain prices to foreign investors, ranging from hedge funds to biofuel producers.

Karuturi Global faces accusations of causing floods to local villages, not paying taxes, contributing to human rights violations and providing dismal working conditions at its farming operations in Gambela, Ethiopia.

It is not too late for equitable partnerships to flourish between foreign investors and local communities.

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Pan-African Parliament calls for a moratorium on large-scale land acquisitions.

Government’s policies of liberalizing land markets and focusing on foreign investment are having a detrimental impact on Zambia’s rural poor.

Land deals are implemented – and often initiated – by sub-national states which are in competition with each other to win major investments.

Are there any answers to this looming crisis? Some countries are buying land. There is vague talk about governments introducing “water management reforms”. Even more opaquely, there are calls for “multi-country discussions on trans-boundary issues, international trade and investment flows”.

African governments need to raise their level of accountability and ensure that they improve and protect their own food security through quid pro quo side-agreements negotiated when they lease or sell their arable land to foreign interests, says Keith Mullin of Thompson Reuters

Walter Global Asset Management says farmland is increasingly attractive to institutional and private investors, which puts Bonnefield in a strong position when it comes to growing its portfolio of Canadian farmland

Leading Chinese "farm to table" agribusiness, with livestock and plantation operations in China, retains New York investment firm

How can it be that finance centers in New York or Stockholm exercise control over lands in Northeastern Brazil?

Global demand for arable land is rising, making Africa a key target for large-scale acquisitions to tackle food and energy challenges.

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

New private equity fund targets Cambodia’s still-developing agriculture sector

MCC is playing a key role in commodifying Africa’s farmlands

How did Brazil become a laboratory for agroinvestment? Through an alliance between big finance and agribusiness. Now, ordinary people are being pulled into financing land- and watergrabbers themselves.

David Gray, senior adviser at investment fund manager Altima Partners, talks to Agrimoney about how stakeholders in farming production companies can best hope to liquidate an unfashionable investment.

Right now, Senhuile Inc is caught in a web of lawsuits.

Commodities trader Jim Rogers, known for his investment prowess alongside George Soros, is in Australia to launch a new rural land fund which is seeking to raise up to $350 million to buy farms in northern NSW