IMF/World Bank paper looks at how foreign investors are buying up farmland in developing countries.

Pambazuka News spoke to Anuradha Mittal, Jeff Furman and Frederic Mousseau about what prompted their research on large-scale investments in land in Africa and what they discovered.

The studies that we have seen can prove no link between land purchases and food security, says German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Personal Assitant on African Affairs.

Qatar pursuing a "shared-benefits model" that meets the needs of investors and local communities in currently cultivated land areas where the yield gaps are large.

Modern machineries of all sorts, owned and run by agri-companies, are turning the soils inside out, destroying forests and beginning to pollute the environment to get more production.

Foreign investors see Africa as a breadbasket. Done well, investment could help with African hunger but create food security for the rest of the world.

As an investment destination, Africa can be a confounding place. The latest bout of turmoil and violence in Cote d'Ivoire and Tunisia looks to all the world like another chapter in an unending cycle of political instability.

Affected rural poor communities and their allies are not likely to simply accept the land grabbing process in the way the World Bank and its supporters might suppose.

The fund will operate according to a Code of Conduct for Land Acquisition and Land Use in to prevent unsustainable practices.

LRAN briefing paper series, October 2010

The 2010 edition of the Africa Progress Panel report, produced under the chairmanship of Mr Kofi Annan, addresses land grabbing in Africa.

An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens

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

Whilst Mali’s government declares its commitment to guaranteeing food self-sufficiency for the country, it continues to sign a worrying number of agreements with foreign investors. A report from Via Campesina.

It's a tsunami of land deals and, as all of the experts who have studied the phenomenon have agreed, no nation is truly prepared for its implications.

Stephen Marks looks at the latest rush by China and countries in the middle east to sign lease agreements in poor countries for agricultural production, and what this trend means in terms of food security and access to arable land for local populations.

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

A total 4,000 hectares of land was allocated by the Ekiti State governor to young farmers in the “Bring Back the Youth in Agriculture” scheme done in partnership with an investor, YSJ Farm in Oke Ako.

Irrigation projects include a US$172mn, 23,000ha project with US-based Valley Irrigation , a €75mn, 13,000 ha project with Spain's Grupo Charmatin, and a US$100mn, 20,000 ha project with US-based Lindsay Zimmatic.

The Gulf’s dispossession of African land for carbon offset projects is key to its efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways.

The new Agricultural Growth Corridors of Tanzania (AGCOT) will follow a similar approach to the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT).

Liberian, West African and international civil society organizations, communities and individuals are alarmed by news that SRC’s parent company, Socfin, is seeking to divest its shares in SRC without first settling its social, environmental, cultural, financial, and economic debts to affected communities.

Fourteen civil society organizations have expressed their disagreement with the manner in which the ongoing Independent Complaints Mechanism pertaining to the operations of company Plantations et Huileries du Congo is being handled.

Vice President Kashim Shettima stated that Nigeria's “70 million hectares of under-utilised arable land”, which is “75 per cent of the country’s total land mass,” makes it best placed for such investment.

Financial players are moving aggressively to snatch up lands around the world with access to water for irrigation. Their strategy is to pump as much water as they can and as fast as they can into the production of crops that reap high prices in export markets.

The Communities who were contending over the equity distribution of ground rent by the owner of the estate, Wing Song M-House, finally reached a mutual understanding after a series of previous engagements with the ministry.

Ten years after the signing of their first lease, we interviewed 30 inhabitants about their experiences and opinions concerning the activities of the Italian JTF-Tozzi Green in Madagascar.

NFFC says that a new “land grab” is underway in the US, with Wall Street investors, pension funds, and other financiers looking for a safe place to park their money and turning to farmlands as their preferred investment.

African Agriculture has agreed to a public-private partnership with the Government of Mauritania and the communities of Boghé on the Senegal River Valley for a phased commercial farming buildout up to $500mm of investment.

In Cambodia, the Bunong people’s sacred forest became a rubber plantation as the government took their commune’s land and leased it to French firm Socfin-KCD and its Cambodian private partner.