Nnimmo Bassey from Nigeria said that these principles legitimize a new form of colonialism with grave dangers for millions of local livelihoods and the environment.

In a move to attract foreign investment, Cambodia has awarded big concessions to companies, mainly from China, Vietnam and South Korea, to run mines, power plants and farms, leading to a rise in forced evictions by state officials profiting on the sale and lease of farmland for use by foreign and local companies.

The Congo ventures are not core businesses to be based in the Congo but instead, extensions of businesses located in South Africa

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

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.

The media and environmentalists must intensify their focus on the environmental costs of international farmland transactions.

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

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.

In Mali the government has approved long-term leases for outside investors to develop more than 160,000 hectares of land. Local farmers say they fear being pushed out.

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

Area nearly the size of France purchased, leased for food production around the world Africa, South America, parts of Europe targeted by cash-rich, food-poor nations

UAE foreign investment in food production have so far focused on leasing Pakistan and Sudan’s agricultural land, with new prospects in Cambodian rice, Canadian wheat and Australian beef. Alongside the strategic deals at the national level, private investment has followed which should open new channels of trade, for example, Al Qudra Holding has plans to grow grain and vegetables in Vietnam and Croatia as well as Pakistan.

"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."

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.

An internal document recently posted on IRRI's website reveals that the Institute has been advising Saudi Arabia in the context of its strategy to acquire farm land overseas for its own food production.

"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

For investors like Susan Payne, the chief executive of Emergent Asset Management, farmland in sub-Saharan Africa is a hot bet.

There may emerge a situation when Ukrainians will be starving in spite of having the most fertile black earth.

It is not clear whether a strategy is in place to ensure that part of the food produced by the rich food importers farms will be sold locally.

THESE days, as we follow the struggle against the Taliban in the northwest, we can be forgiven for missing other important news. For instance, I had filed away a report on plans to lease large chunks of agricultural land in Punjab and Sindh to overseas investors in the back of my mind, planning to write about it later. When I ran a Google search on the subject, however, I realised the enormity of the scam.When I ran a Google search

The Ethiopian government’s ambitious target of harvesting 28 million tonnes of cereals in the first three quarters of the 2007/2008 budget year has failed. Authorities seem determined to change this situation by leasing huge chunks of land to other sovereign states for mechanised farming.

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.

South Korea has just leased half of all the arable land in Madagascar according to the Financial Times. This has stirred quite a debate in the Malagasy blogosphere about land sovereignty and economic development.

Gulf nations now are quietly scouring the globe for rich farmland to rent or buy outright.