Complex web of data reveals large swathes of country controlled by small number of billionaires and large companies
Investors trying to decide what world farmland market in which to allocate capital may want to consider an advantage the Canadian market can offer – the ability to participate via an open-ended structure.
Global commodities giant Cargill continues to buy soybeans from a farm in Brazil that cultivates on illegally acquired and deforested land, including lands acquired by US teachers’ pension fund TIAA.
- Mongabay
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04 February 2021
Rural sociologist Saker El Nour discusses the complex power dynamics between main actors within land reclamation projects in Egypt.
- Mada Masr
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02 February 2021
Un nouveau rapport d'une alliance d'organisations de la société civile dévoile l'un des échecs les plus scandaleux des investissements des banques de développement dans l'agriculture.
- RIAO et al
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28 January 2021
Eva Bande was jailed for her role as a community organizer against land grab by extractive industries on the Indonesian island, Sulawesi. Ten years on, her fight continues.
- Mongabay
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01 December 2020
A new report released today by environmental campaign group Mighty Earth alleges that Michelin, the world’s largest tire company, was complicit in and covered up industrial-scale deforestation of over 2,500 hectares of rainforest in the run-up to the launch of its flagship ‘eco-friendly’ sustainable natural rubber joint venture project in Sumatra, Indonesia.
- Mighty Earth
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06 October 2020
Au Sri Lanka, une circulaire protégeant des milliers d’hectares de forêt pourrait être levée. Officiellement, le but est destiné à soutenir les petits paysans. Mais ce projet s’inscrit dans un contexte moins glorieux où l’on retrouve des multinationales US bien décidées à privatiser aux quatre coins du monde des terres qui échappent à leur appétit vorace.
- Investig’Action
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09 August 2020
A Bangkok court ruled that about 3,000 Cambodians could proceed with a class-action suit against Mitr Phol, the world’s fourth-largest sugar producer. Farmers in Oddar Meanchey province are seeking compensation after the Cambodian government allocated land to the company for sugar plantations.
Major multinational companies including Nestlé and Cargill may be sourcing Nicaraguan beef from indigenous regions consumed by land grabs, settler occupation and mass deforestation.
High Court in Lusaka rules that the conversion of village lands in Muchinda chiefdom for a large-scale agribusiness project was illegal and violated the community’s rights, but stops short of cancelling the company's title.
- Mail & Guardian
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19 May 2020
Cresud controls 370,000 ha in the province of Salta, in the ancestral lands of the Wichi people, where, in the first months of 2020, nine children died from malnutrition and lack of water.
CRR’s sustainability analysis shows that deforestation and fires have taken place on TIAA’s farmland portfolio in Brazil, enabling negative social impacts on local communities.
With fires on their Cerrado properties, Harvard’s and TIAA’s deforestation exposure appears to be growing.
Uganda’s government is supporting the rapid growth of extractive industries, but ranged against this is the swift growth of an eco-feminist movement that regards protection of the environment as essential to the protection of human rights.
Satellite maps show the connection between Harvard and TIAA's farmland acquisitions in Brazil's Cerrado and the massive number of fires that have been burning in the region since July of this year.
- FOE US, GRAIN,NFFC, Rede Social
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22 October 2019
While the Law on how to sell and buy agricultural land prohibits foreigners from buying land in Moldova, then the Land Code does not provide such restrictions.
Effective March 2019 Standard Chartered has new rules related to its financial services activity in the area of agribsuiness
- Standard Chartered
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25 October 2018
ANZ Banking Group violated its own policies and international human rights standards by providing 40 million $ loan to a Cambodian sugar company that seized land from local farmers, according to a statement released by Australian government body that monitors corporate behavior overs.
One of the world's major buyers of farmland is under fire for their involvement in land conflicts, environmental destruction and risky investments. A new report by GRAIN and Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos presents, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of Harvard University's controversial investments in global farmland.
- GRAIN and Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos
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06 September 2018
Tanzania has attracted huge interest as a destination for large-scale agricultural investment due to sufficient land and cheap labour. As traditional laws that once protected village land weaken, indigenous communities and farmers have repeatedly lost chunks of land facilitated by foreign investors.
- InDepth News
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05 August 2018
Award-winning Cameroonian journalist Madeleine Ngeunga and Fern’s Indra Van Gisbergen recently visited villages in the shadow of Socapalm’s oil palm plantations to see if issues driving the dispute between locals and the company are being resolved.
The project leaders of Wanbao Africa Agriculture Development Limited seemed to have an emerging-market hubris every bit as blinding as that of their colonial predecessors.
In Brazil's Cerrado region, large-scale farms have increasingly laid claim to natural lands – often held without deed by traditional communities – with agribusiness counting them as their reserves.
In May 2016, awasMIFEE published a story titled “The Salim Group’s secret plantations in West Papua”, about four concessions owned by the Salim Group in West Papua. A year and a half later, Salim Group is still aggressively expanding, and threatening more areas of remote Papuan forest.
- AwasMIFEE
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07 February 2018
In 2011, three village communities in eastern-central Côte d’Ivoire learned that a Belgian corporation called SIAT was about to move onto their land without their consent.
- IDEF et al.
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12 December 2017
A new book published in Japan says China is buying up land, including farmland, in the northern prefecture and turning the island into a province of its own
- Asia Times
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20 November 2017
There is a large gap between SOCFIN's “responsible management” policy and the reality of violence and destruction around its plantations, where, with the complicity of national governments, the company attempts to suppress people’s resistance.
Swedish investor EcoDevelopment registered a claim at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes against the Tanzanian government on September 11, 2017 for revoking a land title amid concerns over the impact on local communities and a wildlife sanctuary.
Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has issued an edict warning all local chiefs and traditional rulers to desist from land grabbing or face dethronement.