As in many emerging markets, farmland investing in Bulgaria is essentially a consolidation play.

Corporations are starting to buy up US farmland, especially in areas dominated by industrial-scale agriculture, like Iowa and California's Central Valley

There is growing interest from international investors in the New Zealand agricultural sector, particularly from wealthy Europeans, boutique funds manager Mint Asset Management says.

A $50 million commitment was made to ACM Permanent Crops, a fund managed by Agriculture Capital Management that seeks “superior value creation from vertically integrated, sustainable farming.”

Only the Amazon and Congo basins rival Papua New Guinea for pristine tropical wilderness. But 5 million hectares of its jungle is under threat from foreign land grabs and back-door logging.

ANZ is financing a Cambodian sugar plantation that has involved child labour, military-backed land grabs, forced evictions and food shortages.

Transport costs have made the country’s agriculture industry uncompetitive. But new infrastructure projects should transform the opportunities some have seen in land values.

This year could see a surge in interest in farmland from investors with very little experience in this complicated asset class, reports Euromoney

The Kenya Flower Council foresees huge implications for the country when Karuturi goes down, reports Flora Culture International

Women in Sierra Leone are losing their land and livelihoods in the face of land grabs, discriminatory traditions and customs, and the lack of a strong legal framework, reports Mariama Tarawallie of the Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food (SiLNoRF)

Global fund managers and some of the world's largest pension funds have bought more than $1.5 billion of agricultural land in Australia over the past three years.

A controversial foreign investment to produce agrofuels for Europe on 20,000 ha in Senegal has angered communities and sparked violent clashes between peasants and the police.

For the world’s people to have secure access to the quantity and quality of food needed for a decent life, the land grabs and the development of large, highly mechanized factory farms must stop.

Australian Farms Fund Management sells a 40% stake to Melbourne-based Lempriere Capital, the agricultural investment management group that partnered with China's Shandong to purchase the Cubbie Station cotton farm.

Flower growers in Kenya have gone on strike to protest unpaid wages from Karuturi Global, the Indian flower export multinational.

As the world’s population swells beyond seven billion and emerging markets’ appetite for food grows, Canadian institutions are getting increasingly hungry for agribusiness and farmland acquisitions abroad.

The US's Millennium Challenge Corporation says it is helping Burkina Faso to improve its land ownership legislation to protect rural land owners from unfair deals that have seen wealthy buyers acquire vast tracts of land.

Canadian billionaire Ned Goodman holds an 83% stake in Blue Goose Capital Corp. – the largest organic beef operator in North America that produces not only organic beef, but poultry and fish as well.

Rising demand for agricultural commodities has led to a ‘land grab’ in some of the world’s poorest countries. The International Bar Associaiton assesses the legal implications and the prospects for the developing world.

But human rights and environmental groups say private investment has opened Africa to exploitation through land-grabs by foreigners who are exporting crops to meet food and biofuel demands.

Farmland has become the darling of alternative investing, sending hedge funds and wealthy investors into bidding wars for plots of land once deemed ordinary. And it is not just big money getting in on the game. From Stockholm to Chicago to Vancouver, ordinary investor money is pouring into fields around the world.

Sinochem and ZTE Energy, an agribusiness arm of the Shenzhen-based telecoms manufacturer, both bid for 150,000 hectares of palm-oil plantations in 2012, but were promptly rejected.

A Chinese company isn’t buying Smithfield. A shell company based in Cayman Islands is. Instead of a story about “China buying up the world”, this turns out to be a story of a precarious leveraged buyout deal by some large global private equity firms looking to borrow their way to a fortune.

Everywhere in Africa the story is more or less the same: communal rights are being grossly interfered with, farming systems upturned, livelihoods decimated, and water use and environments changed in ways which are dubiously sustainable.

There is "a wall of money" looking for a home in agricultural investments worldwide, say managers for BlackRock's London-based World Agriculture Fund.

Background note to accompany a joint press release on the Kenyan government finding Karuturi Global Ltd guilty of tax evasion

According to BlackRock world agriculture fund portfolio manager and director Desmond Cheung there is a "wall of money" that is looking to back the world's growing appetite for a stable and growing food supply.

A consortium of Saudi groups - comprising dairy giant Almarai, grain importer Al Rajhi and Salic, the agriculture arm of the country's Public Investment Fund sovereign wealth fund – buys Continental Farmers Group, which has large farming operations in Poland and the Ukraine.

In recent times the practice of land grabbing (which is intrinsically tied with water grabbing) has increased.

Bank's accountability panel says complaints by Ethiopians of forced evictions in Gambella should be looked into.