Uganda's minister of agriculture literally pleaded with the agribusiness delegates at a forum in Capetown to take advantage of Uganda’s extremely advantageous deals for private investors in the agricultural sector.

An investor analysis of the case for buying up farmland

"Finance Minister Yousef Hussein Kamal said he had personally been traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, Yemen, Sudan, Tajikistan, and elsewhere to look into investing in agricultural production for the Qatari market," reports the US Embassy in Doha about a visit from US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

In Europe, the appropriation of agricultural land by other actors, such as investors and supermarkets, raises concerns by driving up prices and reducing access for future farmers, as well as threatening food security and the sustainability of the EU.

One of the world’s largest palm oil producers, First Resources, appears to have secretly controlled a network of companies that have been clearing rainforests in Indonesia for more than a decade, an investigation by The Gecko Project has found.

A law to privatise farmland, ultimately for the benefit of global finance and agribusiness, was pushed through Parliament under pressure from the IMF in the context of the coronavirus crisis.

Peasant organisations have pledged to expose the incriminating role of the World Bank and IMF in increasing inequality, land dispossession and poverty, as the annual meeting of these bodies get under way in Bali.

Fonterra's owners are worried about the cooperative's $800m investment in establishing dairy farms in China, which yielded only $1m in earnings last year, despite a $38m subsidy of their operations by Fonterra's China ingredients division.

Peasants in Honduras have sued a branch of the World Bank over its financing of the corporation Dinant, which has vast palm oil plantations in Bajo Aguán valley

“I find it peculiar that a nation that is the venue for so much flow of funds from overseas to invest in our agricultural assets is not the same venue for Australian super funds to invest in,” ag minister Barnaby Joyce says.

So says the chairman of Socfin’s board of directors, Luc Boedt, in response to the occupation of the company’s headquarters by several Belgian NGOs.

The level of Chinese investment in the Australian beef supply chain appears certain to increase as China hunts for new food sources to feed its one and half billion citizens. Nine Chinese companies have outlaid almost $430 million on Australian beef cattle holdings and downstream red meat supply chain.

London-based private equity titan Terra Firma is mulling a partial sale of Australia's largest privately owned beef producer, after being approached by several Chinese companies.

The chairman of the New Hope Group is a key Chinese partner in the Sino-Australia 100-Year Agricultural and Food Safety Partnership-- an initiative founded by mining billionaire Andrew Forrest

India's Ambassador to Ethiopia Sanjay Verma says India's "pioneering" investors are not land grabbing, calls conflicts with local communities "teething problems".

Audit says Liberian government failed to fully apply its own laws when awarding land concessions to palm oil companies Sime Darby and Golden Veroleum and recommends urgent remedial action

Thousands of Ethiopians are being relocated or have already fled as their land is sold off to foreign investors without their consent.

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.

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.

A rush of foreign investment interest in Australian farmland is stirring new concerns about just how much overseas ownership of local agricultural resources is too much.

Cargill and Bunge among firms setting up funds to buy farms in Asia and South America.

Lester Brown, the president of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, says even if the investor comes in wielding impressive, shiny new technology, it will be of little benefit to the small farm holder.

Hostility to foreign investment in a sensitive border area has forced the Turkish government to shelve plans to turn a minefield along its frontier with Syria into organic farmland.

The problem of food security poses a real threat to global stability. Meeting in Italy last weekend, agriculture ministers of the G8 industrialized countries recognized the extent of the problem. They pledged to continue fighting hunger. But beyond calling for increased public and private investment in agriculture, the final communiqué of the ministerial meeting was short on fresh proposals.

Nomadic herders, rarely a priority for governments, are being dispossessed by bioethanol developments in Kenya, says Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition (ILC), and they also depend on the “unused” land that Madagascar offered Daewoo.

The increased use of land as a commodity and the increasing demand for land has resulted in more forced land evictions.

A Colombian company co-owned by Miami developer Moishe Mana produces dairy, Tahiti limes, mangoes, oranges, pineapples and corn on 2,471 acres of farms.

Many rural communities affected by agricultural concessions in Liberia have seen their ancestral gravesites leveled in some of the worst land-grabs in human history.

Uganda's Non-Governmental Organization Bureau has suspended 54 organizations for alleged 'non-compliance', including Witness-Radio, which has been defending several communities whose lands have been grabbed by foreign agribusinesses.

Sierra Leone's parliament has unanimously approved a foreign investment agreement giving Elite Agro (UAE) 14,700 hectares to grow rice for export