Qatar's sovereign wealth fund will turn its focus to commodities - particularly food and energy - in the second half of 2009, a senior official said yesterday.

Could the Middle East become a significant new source of offshore investment in Australia’s extensive northern cattle industry?

Saudi Arabia has announced the arrival of the first food crop harvested in Saudi-owned farms abroad, in a sign that the kingdom is moving faster than expected to outsource agricultural production.

Agriculture opportunities are accessed through land purchase (for production of foodstuffs or, more recently, biofuels), through equity investments in companies associated with this theme or – as is the case for £143m Ceres Agriculture fund – through pure derivative strategies.

Last year South Africa became a net importer of food for the first time in more than 20 years, reigniting concerns about food security and the viability of some farming sectors.

Lonrho, the pan-African conglomerate listed in London, has secured leasehold rights to 25,000 hectares of rice paddies in Angola and is negotiating two bigger land deals in Mali and Malawi, in another sign of investor appetite for African land.

The initial welcome given to rich countries’ investment in African farmland by agricultural and development officials has faded as the first ventures prove to be heavily weighted in favour of the investors. The FAO warned of such a trend when it said this year that the race to secure farmland overseas risked creating a “neo-colonial” system.

Pirates are not the only source of concern off the African coast. The deal South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics is negotiating with the Madagascan government looks rapacious. Alas, it is but the latest brazen example of a wider phenomenon.

Daewoo Logistics of South Korea said it expected to pay nothing to farm maize and palm oil in an area of Madagascar half the size of Belgium, increasing concerns about the largest farmland investment of this kind.

Daewoo Logistics of South Korea has secured farmland in Madagascar to grow food crops for Seoul, in a deal that diplomats and consultants said was the largest of its kind.

The United Arab Emirates is seeking to invest in agricultural projects in Kazakhstan as part of its efforts to secure food supplies.

“Look at the colour, what a beautiful crop,” says Richard Spinks, pointing to wheat and rapeseed fields that his company sowed this season in western Ukraine. “If all of Ukraine’s farms could produce the yields we are getting, this country could play a big role in feeding the world and establish itself as a geopolitical power,” says the British chief executive of London-listed Landkom.

Allegations of illegal activity and land-grabbing against Indonesia’s second-largest palm oil company continue to mount as a new report reveals the firm’s violations appear to be more extensive than initially documented.

Canada's Blended Finance Project interviews Witness Radio and GRAIN about the role public development banks play in facilitating land grabs around the world.

In order to attract capital, selected regions for development projects must dramatize their potential as places for investment, carefully selecting project locations and participants who will make compromises so as to conceal failure, virtually guaranteeing that the programme will be declared a success when the time comes for evaluation.

When Gulf nations face food, security, and water scarcity issues, one response is to seek lucrative agricultural investments in fertile African lands. Yet, while such deals can bring benefits to the countries involved, there are also sizeable risks

The elite university has quietly become one of the largest owners of farmland in the world, according to a new report by GRAIN, an international nonprofit supporting small farmers, and Brazil-based Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos

Food security of the Gulf states is heavily dependent on foreign imports. Europe and the Americas have been the traditional markets supplying food to them, but recent development of African Continental Free Trade Area may encourage Gulf investors to embrace potential opportunities in Africa.

Despite claims that a massive agricultural development deal in Mozambique will benefit the country’s citizens, there are indications that the project is designed to benefit a select few and could leave 100,000 Mozambicans displaced, write Khadija Sharife, Luis Nhachote

The US public and private sectors are among the leading drivers of a global drive to snap up usable – and often in-use – agricultural land, in what critics say remains a steadily increasing epidemic of “land-grabbing.”

Minutes from the Karuturi Global Limited Q2 FY2012 results conference call.

Kilombero Plantations Limited chief executive officer Carter Coleman talks about his company's large-scale farming operations in Tanzania, including the removal of the "Project Affected Persons" previously farming the lands.

The Ethiopian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development recently released the Land Rent Contractual Agreements for land leases between the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) and twenty-four companies or individuals.

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.

Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories

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

"Al Shariqi said that while the government does not have foreign agricultural investments, some UAE sheikhs personally own land in Pakistan, Egypt, Australia and New Zealand," reports the US mission in Abu Dhabi

As the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank, announces plans to increase investment in agribusiness by up to 30 per cent in the next three years, NGO reports shed light on the IFC's role in the 'land grab' movement and flaws in its approach to the food crisis.

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.

The 450 civil society organisations taking part in a parallel forum were not won over by FAO's optimism about a code of conduct. "Land grabbing by external capital must stop," read a declaration by participants at the forum.