Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, managing director of Karuturi Global Ltd was conferred with the award for business excellence in agribusiness in Africa by Corporate Council on Africa, for the year 2009.

Over the next couple of weeks we will see a level of political frenzy let loose on the international stage.

Developed nations attempt to secure supplies of food and biofuels to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the food and energy security of their populations, Khadija Sharife writes in this week’s Pambazuka News

Agribusiness and global investors are scooping up farmland. Are corporate farmers the new colonialists? asks BusinessWeek

Sources close to Al-Amoudi said that the king has shown an interest in seeing other Saudi companies involved in rice farming after seeing the samples presented by Al-Amoudi

Lured by a new business model, wealthy nations flock to farmland in Ethiopia, locking in food supplies grown half a world away

There’s a whole school of economic thought that says that Collier is wrong, that big is not necessarily better in agriculture — and that the land deals therefore might be unwise not because they’re wrong but because they’re unprofitable.

Investment in agriculture is soaring. So, worryingly, is distrust of markets and trade.

Across the street from the conference, human rights and farmers' groups protested sporadically throughout the three days. Small farmers' groups put on street theatre, re-enacting scenes of land-grabbing by foreign companies, with thugs bearing sticks pretending to threaten the small land owners.

Ethiopia's agriculture ministry put an advertisement in its website for 180,625 hectares along the Omo River in southern Ethiopia.

Area nearly the size of France purchased, leased for food production around the world Africa, South America, parts of Europe targeted by cash-rich, food-poor nations

"We decided to update a previous feasibility study due to the fact that the prices of food items that will potentially be grown on the project's lands, including fodder and grains, have changed drastically over the past year," Jordan's Agriculture Ministry Secretary General Radhi Tarawneh said

The ministerial Forum on China-Africa Cooperation met in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, last week, attended by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and representatives of more than 300 Chinese companies.

Many small Ethopian farmers do not share their leaders' enthusiasm for leasing off farmland to foreign investors

“Governments are sitting on a box of dynamite,” Namanga Ngoni, president of AGRA, initiated by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, told the media.

The Ethiopian government says concerns about foreign investors exporting food are outweighed by the plantations’ capacity to bring the country foreign exchange and technology, as well as creating employment.

Earlier this year, delegates to the annual session of China’s parliament debated a proposal to seek employment for up to 100 million Chinese in various African countries to solve two of China’s greatest challenges—food security and unemployment.

More than 50 heads of state will gather for a summit later this month to look at ways of policing the extraordinary "land grab" that has seen richer countries buy up at least 20m ha of farmland in Africa in the last 18 months.

Ethiopia plans to offer 3 million hectares of land over the next two years for investors to develop large-scale commercial farms, a government official said on Thursday.

The fervour with which foreign commercial interests are forcing their agricultural 'solutions' on the African continent represents nothing more than an established endeavour to protect profits and access to resources.

These issues will be central to the World Summit on Food Security to be held from November 16 through 18 at the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

Representatives from the Ministries of Agriculture, Commerce and Industry, Finance, and Transportation will participate in a forum on November 14-15 [2009] in Addis Ababa to officially mark the beginning of a cooperative project under which Ethiopia made one million hectares of land available for Saudi private companies to develop.

The Saudi Binladin Group's $4.3 billion planned investment in Papua, east Indonesia, to develop rice fields has stalled because of problems acquiring land from local people.

If all these land deals will be beneficial to Pakistan in the long run, why is the government refusing to divulge the details of what is the citizens’ common property?

The Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF) says these land deals exclude farmers and threaten their livelihoods.

Ernest Corea, a former senior consultant with the Washington-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), told IPS the surrender of nationally-owned farm land and land rights to foreign interests - whether individuals, the corporate sector or governments - amounts to an erosion of sovereignty.

Farmland deals in Africa inked by private Egyptian firms, commonly called "land grabs," could help the import-dependent nation get access to grain when markets spike, Egypt's agriculture minister Amin Abaza said. "This is going to be a private initiative."

No deal was ever secured with Qatar, and China is now being eyed as a more appropriate suitor for the project.

In the future it seems most likely that improved food security will be achieved through a combination of farmland investment, the traditional free flow of trade in agricultural commodities and food products, and insurance market support to underwrite all of these activities, says FDI Magazine