2017 went down as one of the deadliest years ever for land defenders. It was also a pretty bad year for several land grabbers.

Research shows that the plantation model of development has failed to deliver promised benefits to Liberia’s rural people and that they benefit far more from retaining their traditional lands.

Groups express support for the French newspapers and NGOs accused of defamation for reporting on the mobilisation of villagers and farmers in West Africa who live near SOCFIN's plantations. The case opened in Paris on January 25.

Nearly 200 square kilometers of forest have been cleared in Merauke, Indonesia's Papua region since 2014 for the plantation, with 10 square kilometers being opened up just since October.

Between 2002 and 2011 the Papua New Guinea government issued more than 75 SABL leases covering more than 50,000 square kilometres of land. The leases were the subject of a Commission of Inquiry which found widespread fraud and other abuses.

Hassad Food – owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund the Qatar Investment Authority – is selling another major portion of its Australian farmland portfolio worth about $80 million.

Nigeria’s biggest private sector company, the Dangote Group, has decided to turn its attention to agribusiness. Dangote will pay the state government N1.2bn ($3.7m) for 16,000 hectares of land and give it an equity stake in the company.

This is the question addressed by researchers and activists at a recent IDRC Workshop on Large-scale Land Acquisitions (LSLAs) and Accountability in Africa, in Dakar, Senegal on 24-25 November 2015.

To mark the International Human Rights Day today, peasant and indigenous groups are filing cases to seek justice for victims of human rights violations related to land conflicts.

It is SEFE’s assessment that the Herakles project was simply a poorly conceived project, badly managed, in the wrong place.

State-owned trust firm Beijing International Trust Co. recently figured out a way to launch a product tied to 160 acres of peach orchards in a little village located in Wuxi, about an hour and a half by train west of Shanghai.

AIM-listed Paragon acquires 10% shareholding in Paragon Volta Limited, which is in the process of finalising a sublease over 5,000 ha close to the River Volta in Ghana from a much larger farm land estate.

Communities face a “double whammy” in which High Carbon Stock areas restrict locals from cultivating the land while companies establish plantations outside of the zone where people are already farming.

Sinochem and ZTE Energy, an agribusiness arm of the Shenzhen-based telecoms manufacturer, both bid for 150,000 hectares of palm-oil plantations in 2012, but were promptly rejected.

When the Ethiopian government completes the Gibe III dam on the upper Omo, as it is expected to do shortly, large-scale irrigation will follow, allowing government sugar plantations to gobble up huge swathes of their ancestral land.

Thousands of Ethiopians are being driven off their ancestral land that the government's selling without their consent to foreign investors buying up vast swathes of farmland, a U.S. watchdog reports.

Wealthy Gulf Arab companies are boosting their investment in Africa's vast lands and untapped resources, marking a shift for investors who have traditionally directed their money towards assets in the United States and Europe.

What should be done about land grabs, and who should do it, remains a topic of intense debate on the international stage.

Via Campesina highlights the risks that peasant agriculture will face if the issue of agricultural investment were to open the door to new land- water- and natural resources’ grabbing.

Six foreign-owned companies are currently trying to secure over 1 million hectares (about 2.5 million acres) of land for the production of palm oil in the country's forested southern zone, according to a coalition of environmental organisations.

The following report, by independent researcher Anna Bolin, explores the global trends and influences at work behind agriculture mega-projects like MIFEE in Papua.

Report says largescale foreign agri-investment offers 'few solutions to the poverty and hunger plaguing the country'

With investors from the Middle East and the U.S., Africa Atlantic Farms is pursuing mechanised farming on 10,000 hectares it has leased in Ghana in the Afram Plains region, with plans to expand.

Hundreds of civil society organisations including farmers' movements, women's groups and non-governmental organisations, will launch a global appeal against farmland grabbing during the G20 meeting on Agriculture in Paris on June 22 and 23.

The Republic of Congo has handed over 80,000 ha of arable land to a company owned and operated by 14 South African farmers.

UNCTAD believes pension funds, with their apparent focus on reputation, accountability, and the long term, could set new best-practice standards as they join the farmland investment trend.

The UK-based EPO has almost 170,000 ha of land suitable for sustainable crude palm oil cultivation and its aim is to be a 100,000 ha producer with output totalling 250,000 tonnes per annum.

"They are selling off African land for a song," said Ndiogou Fall, president of the executive committee for the Network of Peasant Organizations and Producers in West Africa (ROPPA), which is calling for dialogue between governments, producers and African and foreign investors.

Somebody must have run the numbers and discovered that if it made commercial sense to practice oasis farming in the sands of Arabia, then it must make eminently more sense to invest in more fertile Sahel land for agricultural purposes.

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.