Demeter International got a 25-year lease for 10,000 ha of Bwabwata National Park, which it will start ploughing in October. Hundreds of families will lose access to the forest.
Cargill and Bunge among firms setting up funds to buy farms in Asia and South America.
Unfortunately, the US Senate inquiry into Goldman Sach's alleged malfeasance is unlikely to question why the company in 2008 decided to acquire ten intensive poultry farms in China's Hunan and Fujian provinces for $300 million.
- Huffington Post
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04 May 2010
MCC is playing a key role in commodifying Africa’s farmlands
La lutte contre l’accaparement de terres a au Mexique une longue histoire. Le rejet du “Procede” dans les communautés indigènes, l’occupation de grandes propriétés au Chiapas à la suite du soulèvement zapatiste, la résistance des paysans d’Atenco et tant d’autres conflits montrent que l’initiative de la Banque Mondiale dans notre pays ne passera pas.
The global rush to acquire agricultural land in bountiful Africa evokes concern and protests.
FIDP has launched a Cambodia and Laos fund, “an extended China play” that will focus largely on agriculture, seeking to benefit from China’s desire for food security.
- Financial Times
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18 April 2010
The Congo ventures are not core businesses to be based in the Congo but instead, extensions of businesses located in South Africa
- Mail & Guardian
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12 Mar 2010
Right now communities in Latin America, as around the world, are suffering a new kind of invasion of their territories
More radical steps are being taken to increase production, both by the government, which recently approved two new strains of genetically modified rice, and by agricultural entrepreneurs, who are buying and cultivating land in neighbouring countries.
- Guardian
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23 February 2010
There is something amazingly patronising in the way Payne claims that Emergent has ‘adopted’ a Mozambican village of 3,000 people and hired its citizens to clear 2,000 acres of land to farm it with her firm.
- Agriprods
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18 February 2010
US government cable discusses 24 January 2010 meeting organised by Swiss Development Corporation, UN Food and Agriculture Organization and International Fund for Agricultural Investment on "Land, Investment, and Development," attended by many of the key players working on responsible international agro-industrial and land investment principles
- Wikileaks
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04 February 2010
The Indonesian government is wise to learn from the South Korea Daewoo-Madagascar deal, which demonstrated the enormous economic, social and political risks associated with foreign ownership of land and water rights.
- CSR Asia
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03 February 2010
A discussion note prepared by FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD and the World Bank Group to contribute to an ongoing global dialogue.
- World Bank
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25 January 2010
A foreign company intends to clear 10 000 hectares of land in the Bwabwata National Park in northern Namibia in order to set up a large-scale irrigation scheme for crop farming
- The Namibian
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22 January 2010
The media and environmentalists must intensify their focus on the environmental costs of international farmland transactions.
- World Politics Review
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20 January 2010
Uganda has agreed to allow Egypt to cultivate wheat on Ugandan soil.
- Daily News Egypt
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12 January 2010
He confirmed that the Ministry received very wide offers of investment by Arab and foreign investors.
- IRAQdirectory.com
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09 January 2010
The much-discussed Congo land-lease, granting 200,000 hectares to South African farmers with a further 10 million hectares in the balance, appears to mark a departure from the usual terms underpinning foreign acquisition of fertile land by multinationals
- Pambazuka
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07 January 2010
"On today's Human Rights Day, we demand that States fulfill their obligation to respect and protect the right to food of their citizens and abroad by preventing large scale land grabbing" says Sofia Monsalve of FIAN International.
Ethiopia's potential can be maximized only if we Ethiopians are the producers and sellers of our own agricultural products. What Meles Zenawi is doing now is putting this upside down. He made our potential buyers the sellers of our commodity.
- Ethiomedia
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03 December 2009
Sources close to Al-Amoudi said that the king has shown an interest in seeing other Saudi companies involved in rice farming after seeing the samples presented by Al-Amoudi
- Addis Fortune
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24 November 2009
"The motivation for South African farmers is simple," said Theo de Jager, Agri SA's deputy president, who helped negotiate the deal. "One in four farms must be redistributed in the next four or five years. So for new entrants into the sector and for those farmers who want to expand there is nowhere to go."
- National Post
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21 October 2009
Civil society, including African farmers unions, need to educate local people that such land deals are not in their interests, however couched in 'win-win' terminology they appear to be.
Pursuing its strategy of penetrating the Middle East market, the company has set up a special committee to study the possibility to increase exports to the region. So far, the company has signed a farming contract with Bahrain for supplying food products.
- The Nation
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02 September 2009
"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.
A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs
- The Independent
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09 August 2009
Africa’s agrarian questions are not adequately addressed by simply asking, “What is the role of African smallholders?”
A focus on agricultural productivity should not become a cover for foreign private companies to grab land or impose expensive, input-intensive methods in the name of modernisation.
We challenge the line agencies, legislators and national government to immediately stop the leasing of public land to foreign corporations. Instead, public lands that have huge potential to ensure food security and nation building should be distributed to Filipino small farmers.