This year could see a surge in interest in farmland from investors with very little experience in this complicated asset class, reports Euromoney

The returns on investments in South African farmland consistently outstrip those of local and international equities, bonds and real estate, says Futuregrowth Asset Management, the venture capital arm of Old Mutual.

Hedge funds and bankers are buying everything from farmland to mines across the Global South. Mark L Thomas looks at how speculators here fuel exploitation half a world away

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Les communautés riveraines des plantations de la société Plantations et Huileries du Congo (PHC) au nord-est de la République Démocratique du Congo (RDC) revendiquent un peu plus de 58 000 hectares de terres et veulent accéder aux titres fonciers de la société pour connaître les limites de ses concessions.

A private equity farming giant with more than 1,500 acres of land in Fresno and Tulare counties and 8,600 acres statewide has declared bankruptcy.

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.

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

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.

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

With very low interest rates having taken root across asset classes and investors abiding in their hunt for higher yields, the world’s largest manager of global farmland, Nuveen, says the season may be ripe for a strategic allocation to the $2.3 trillion market for U.S. farm real estate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.’"

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?