We believe that there's plenty of land in Africa and Africa will feed the world, says Nuradin Osman, AGCO managing director for Africa and Middle East.

The ProSavana coordination team, together with the governments of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan, has resorted to enticement and has set out to co-opt national civil society organisations.

"There is no limit to the scale we can achieve" says Farmland Partners CEO, as his company plans to branch out from US into Australia and New Zealand.

As with previous moments of enclosure and commercialisation, Africa’s recent land rush is already sparking resistance and counter-movements.

Government considers the development of two plots of land on the Ord River irrigation scheme so risky that it demanded a $150 million a year guarantee from the Chinese company behind the farming project.

“We want our land back,” said Bindu Kannea, a mother and a farmer who lives in Grand Cape Mount County. In Liberia community resistance to palm oil expansion is about protecting their last remaining pieces of land.

On Monday, March 23th the World Bank's Conference on Land and Poverty begins in the US. But farmer organizations, indigenous groups, trade unions and others denounce the whole exercise as a sham that is all about accelerating corporate land grabs and robbing the poor that the Bank was founded to assist.

Myanmar may go back to being one of the world's major rice exporters in five to 10 years, as many Thai and foreign investors are looking to expand in rice mills and farms in the country.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is teaming up with the China National Machinery Industry Corporation to acquire a 5,000 ha dairy farm in Queensland to supply infant formula to China.

Saudi companies are making major forays into agriculture in Sudan as is evident from the recent acquisition of agricultural lands covering an area of approximately 4,000 acres in Sudan's northern region

"For instance, SAGCOT targets to help 100,000 farmers in all regions it operates. Nothing is said about 38 million farmers in Tanzania!" says the head of the Network of Farmers’ Groups in Tanzania (Mviwata)

Land reform movements, organizations of indigenous peoples, small farmers, and other citizens are responding to the increased sacking of land and other natural resources throughout the global South.

Documents suggest Cargill acquired thousands of acres in the Vichada department from small farmers through 19 different legal entities controlled by four Cargill subsidiaries.

China is headed to spend a record this year on food assets and farms after a $32.7 billion splurge in the past five years and just $4.2 billion in the prior half-decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

There is "a wall of money" looking for a home in agricultural investments worldwide, say managers for BlackRock's London-based World Agriculture Fund.

Prime Minister John Key has told Chinese officials that foreign ownership of farmland is a sensitive issue in New Zealand.

"The World Bank has launched a consultative process with all stakeholders to review and update our environmental and social safeguards policies, which will be informed by the VGs. Land acquisition is a part of this conversation."

As PrimeAg Australia's $125 million sale of rural properties to US fund manager TIAA-CREF goes through, the question now being raised by investors is what will happen to the residual portfolio.

For all the willing buyers seeking tracts of Australian farm land, local investors are not among them. They wonder what all the fuss is about.

Chinese property development conglomerate Shanghai Zhongfu has won the sole right to develop 15,200ha of high-value irrigated agricultural land in northern Australia..

The ethics complaint was filed by the Des Moines-based citizen group, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, for misusing his membership on the Iowa Board of Regents that oversees Iowa's public universities to advance an "African land grab".

In this extract from his book The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth, Fred Pearce witnesses the relentless plundering by intensive commercial farmers of Brazil’s rich savannah

Two international organisations, Oxfam and Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), face de-registration for what government calls inciting violence over land issues.

Leading environmental campaigning organisation Friends of the Earth International and La Via Campesina have released two videos showing how projects financed by World Bank funds have allegedly led to African land grabs.

The scariest aspect of this unfolding phenomenon is that despite the foreseeable terrible consequences, the appetite among the rich countries to own a piece of this developing-country fertile land continues to grow, turning to an ugly competition.

A new report by Greenomics Indonesia documents how the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate threatens peatland and forest in Papua province, Indonesia.

Chinese investors are buying New Zealand farmland for the first time as economic ties with the Asian powerhouse grow ever deeper, sparking considerable anxiety in a country where livelihoods are heavily reliant on agriculture.

Three weeks ago, a team of Vietnamese investors and their technical advisers visited Sierra Leone to conduct feasibility studies with the aim of entering the agribusiness sector in the country.

Dutch-owned Genesis farms is producing Nerica rice seeds on 220 acres of land leased for 20 years in Port Loko District, Sierra Leone.

Nirmal Seeds wants not more than 30,000 hectares of land in Tanzania to invest in seeds production to feed the local market.