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.

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

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.

Presentations at a symposium organised by the Swiss government on World Food Day 2009

Bangkok was wary of GCC efforts to ensure its food supplies by purchasing rice growing lands, and now political instability is chilling the investment climate. Tom Spender reports

The Guyana government has rolled out several invitations to regional investors that included land offers for agricultural purposes.

THESE days, as we follow the struggle against the Taliban in the northwest, we can be forgiven for missing other important news. For instance, I had filed away a report on plans to lease large chunks of agricultural land in Punjab and Sindh to overseas investors in the back of my mind, planning to write about it later. When I ran a Google search on the subject, however, I realised the enormity of the scam.When I ran a Google search

Von Braun says many details of the land deals are unknown because of a lack of transparency. But he estimates the amount of land and money involved. “It adds up to 15 to 20 million hectares currently under negotiation…. So it’s fairly large. How much money is involved? If we add up the deals negotiated and the investments planned, it adds up to $20 to $30 billion of investment,” he says.

Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.

"A path to agro-investments replacing international food aid"

As the vicious food price crisis deepens, transnational companies are moving into southern countries on a huge scale and starting to capture millions of hectares of land in order to bring agricultural production further under their control for industrial agrofuel and food production for the international market. Millions of peasants will be pushed out of food production, adding to the hungry in the rural areas and the slums of the big cities. The few that remain will work under full control of the transnational companies as workers or contract farmers.

Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.

Soaring food prices, supply fears among import-dependent countries and rising demand for biofuels have driven up investment in agricultural land, notably in Africa.

Recent attempts by Persian Gulf countries to invest in farmlands abroad to counter soaring inflation and guarantee long-term food security could prove to be a win-win situation in the short term for both the oil-rich region and its investment-hungry neighbors, but continued high oil prices may neutralize the gains in the long-run, say experts.

Japan has steadily prepared for food security by buying 12 million hectares of croplands around the world, from Southeast Asia and China to South America. By comparison, the amount of Korea’s overseas croplands is negligible.

The tech behemoth is betting that planting millions of eucalyptus trees in Brazil will be the path to a greener future. Some ecologists and local residents are far less sure.

The Italian multinational Tozzi Green has begun planting trees on land that local residents claim was stolen from them

As 2024 drew to a close, the International Land Coalition widely circulated a new report. The report argues that data supplied by ILC partners, combined with improved land rights, can turn today's massive land grab for carbon offset projects into a win-win situation. This is delusional and wrong.

An Indonesian government plan to clear forests spanning an area twice the size of South Korea for food and biofuel crops has sparked fears of massive greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss.

Eni is pursuing agricultural production for biofuels in six African countries, including the Republic of the Congo where collaboration with ‘Big Agri’ companies risks land dispossession and environmental degradation.

Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California's scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink

More than a decade since the surge in large-scale land acquisitions worldwide, many land deals remain in limbo. They nonetheless have far-reaching consequences for those who depend on land as foundational to life.

UK-based social impact and sub-Saharan-focused investor AgDevCo announced its latest investment of $3 million in Quinta da Bela Vista Limitada – an irrigated banana estate in Mozambique’s Boane area.

For farmers in Asia as elsewhere, land ownership and effective control is the key to any radical transformation of the food systems and for attempts to achieve genuine sustainable development to really matter.

Companies are seeking to press ahead with investments on community lands or even take advantage of the pandemic to avoid the usual authorization requirements

Belgian sugar producer Finasucre has agreed to acquire the Winfield Road aggregation – the largest Macadamia portfolio in Australia – from Hancock Agricultural Investment Group for a record-breaking $59.2 million.

O presente livro é resultado dos debates do I Seminário sobre Estrangeirização de Terras e Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional

A popular movement centred on a small farming village in northern Mozambique has, for the moment, halted an attempt to move to cash-crop monocultures mainly for export.

Joint statement endorsed by 93 international, regional and national organizations to mark the “Day of the Landless”

The Rohatyn Group has agreed to acquire GMO Renewable Resources from Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. No financial terms were disclosed. GMORR is a provider of investment opportunities in forestry and agriculture investing.