These ‘food pirates’ come with bags full of foreign direct investment and are moving swiftly where land is available, investing in crops that can be shipped back home.

Private investment in Africa's agriculture is rising. says Neil Crowder of British firm Chayton Africa, which recently acquired a farm in Zambia.

Principles for responsible agriculture investment are stock templates, designed to deflect the fallout from a growing number of media reports of land deals between investors and governments.

Local food companies are not financially capable of investing in farmlands abroad to grow basic staples that would insulate them from soaring prices of raw materials, they said on the sidelines of Gulfood 2011.

The final version of the appeal is open for endorsement on-line until March 31, 2011

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.

Gates says many large land deals in Africa are beneficial, criticizes Western groups for holding them back, and says those who invest in Africa are the ones who are at risk.

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.

Brazil seeks to downplay fears that it was seeking to block foreign investment in its farmland, saying instead it was looking to ease restrictions for farmers rather than speculators.

There are massive areas of agricultural lands and huge water resources in some countries that suffer financial constraints, while there are some rich Arab states that have the money but not the land or the water.

MOU signed with Perigon Advisory to launch a RM3 billion agribusiness fund to promote food security in the OIC and generate returns for its investors.

China is gearing up for a multi-billion-dollar investment push into the Australian agricultural sector to secure food supplies after a senior official admitted the country would face pressure supplying farm produce to its 1.3 billion people over the next five years.

"All of a sudden the world is waking up and saying, 'Wow, emerging markets, food security... this asset class is going to really perform in the medium term -- the next 8-20 years,'" says new convert James Howard, manager of the Futuregrowth Agri-Fund

Experts meeting at the World Bank in Washington, DC, discuss how best to assist African smallholder farmers to transition from subsistence to commercial farming.

Building overseas food production bases, developing overseas food resources and vitalizing direct overseas transactions and diversification of import sources are crucial for Korea

Investing in Adecoagro is “a way to play the potential global shortage of food, especially in emerging markets,” says Francis Gaskins, president of IPOdesktop.com

Africa is up for sale by the acre to the highest bidder. But how can rice exports from Ethiopia to Saudi Arabia be justified?

With climate change and rising demand for biofuels pushing up food prices, rich countries are increasingly looking for land in poorer nations to feed themselves. But is this at the expense of the host country?

ILC leads development of 30 studies on large-scale international and domestic land acquisitions and the factors that are driving demand for investments in land.

Land deals, whether as direct purchases or long-term leases, are being brokered in poor countries by advanced capitalist countries and their TNCs

A closer look at Qatar’s successful bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and the relationship between sports investments by oil-rich nations and acquisitions by their sovereign wealth funds.

"We have set up a global food system that supports speculation. And with [such] markets, we can't get speculators out of the food business," said Lester Brown, an agricultural policy expert and founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

Holdings in productive assets such as farmland can be managed to a high degree of ESG performance, but require a commensurately high degree of investor expertise, says this report sponsored by the Swiss government

Food prices are soaring again and the highest risks of farmland expropriation remain in Latin America, while the greatest impact of the recent rally could be on land deals in Africa.

"We want to make agriculture sexy," says the head of Macquaraie's Retail Agribuiness operation.

The seizing of the poor farmers' land is destroying their only hope of survival on earth.

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.

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land.

South African farmers moving to neighbouring African states are not putting SA’s food security under threat, says Willie du Plessis, a director of agricultural banking at Standard Bank.