Are foreign investors really snatching up as much of Africa as they can? It’s not that simple, Foreign Policy reports.

Saudi Star Agricultural Development Plc, perhaps the biggest agro industry firm in Ethiopia, has added a big name to its roaster: Fikru Desalegn, former state minister for Capacity Building,

Growing world food insecurity is ushering in a new geopolitics of food scarcity, one where competition for land and water is crossing national boundaries.

The Confederation of Indian Industry disagrees with critics of India's foreign landgrabbing for agriculural production

President Armando Emilio Guebuza and PM Shinzo Abe must respect the legitimate and sovereign demands of the people of Mozambique, Brazil and Japan and suspend ProSavana and the G8 New Alliance.

Emami Biotech's project has already begun at Awash Sebat Kilo some 250 km east of the capital Addis Ababa growing Jatropha, sunflower, castor, pulses and various herbs at a cost of $24 million.

As interest in transnational land acquisition for food production grows, the importance of legal customary tenure recognition becomes more apparent.

"Leasing or giving away a huge chunk of land to foreigners, who will produce food to be shipped to their own people, and to hope that the money gained in profits will feed the local people is the height of naivete," Gathuru Mburu of ABN said

The Solvent Extractors Association, the Indian oilseeds industry body, has formed a consortium of 18 companies to acquire 10,000 hectares of prime farmland in a $40-million deal in Uruguay and Paraguay to cultivate oilseeds and pulses. The association says they are hamstrung only by access to finance, otherwise they have it all sewn up.

"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.

When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled.

To speak only of the ‘threats and potential opportunities’ that these investments highlight leaves underexposed the grave risks to human rights that they pose, writes Dr. Margot Salomon, from the London School of Economics

Article analyses the effects on local actors, their land access, land use and tenure security of a large-scale land deal in northern Laos that a Chinese company initiated but subsequently abandoned.

Ten thousand peasant families are victims of the most aggressive and imperialist initiative backed by the G8 countries

"We support continued efforts to develop principles for investment in the agricultural sector undertaken by the World Bank, regional development banks, FAO, UNCTAD, and IFAD," say G8 heads of state.

Participants agreed on the importance of an open and inclusive dialogue to continue encouraging responsible agricultural investment by various parties.

Heightened land values have caused several Egyptian banks, private companies and government bodies to purchase agricultural land in Africa, in addition to focusing greater attention on Egypt’s land resources.

Today, 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Despite decades of anti-colonial civilian resistance in Africa, a pernicious movement of land acquisition is overtaking the continent at a rate unprecedented since the conquests of the 19th Century.

To be brutally honest, mutual interest is the opposite of what investor countries are looking for

While Dutch ag investors get priority access to 1500 ha near Hawassa, their embassy is helping the Ethiopian government start a conversation with its discontented population.

A Dutch-run flower farm in northern Ethiopia was among a series of foreign-owned plantations attacked by anti-government protesters as unrest in the country spreads.

Internal watchdog finds link between World Bank financing and Ethiopian government's mass resettlement of indigenous group

Despite the lucrative returns that foreign investors can achieve by investing in African agriculture, the on-the-ground realities of operating in the continent is often less rosy.

Failing rains and drought are not the primary causes of the chronic food shortage and persistent famine hitting Ethiopia given the immense potential the country has.

Ethiopia must harness its enormous agricultural potential, not by selling it off as a cheap commodity, but by supporting farmers in growing culturally appropriate crops for domestic markets, using agro-ecologically sustainable farming methods.

More than 300,000 people were asked to clear an area the size of Belgium to pave the way for a program with the prime purpose of leasing or selling lands to foreign investors.

The 2014 Omnibus Appropriations Bill contains provisions that ensure that US development funds are not used to support forced evictions in Ethiopia.

The slow progress of Karuturi Global and similar projects has prompted the Ethiopian government to reassess its policy of leasing vast tracts of land to single investors.

Ethiopia’s government said it won’t cooperate with a probe into whether the World Bank violated its own policies by funding a program in which thousands of people were allegedly relocated to make way for agriculture investors.