Commodities trader Jim Rogers, known for his investment prowess alongside George Soros, is in Australia to launch a new rural land fund which is seeking to raise up to $350 million to buy farms in northern NSW

There is a lot of focus on the growing global population and what it means for food demand. One result sees investors taking notice of returns on resources that provide food, including farmland.

The government has not presented satisfactory and truthful explanations about its actions, let alone credible defense of its role as agency and facilitator of the abominable practices of farmland grabbing.

There is a jobs cow waiting to be milked in Africa. It is agriculture and agri-business, says World Bank VP of Africa Region

Since the food and financial crisis in 2008, a race for arable land has started worldwide. States, corporations, banks and funds of rich countries buy up large chunks of land to produce agrofuels and grow crops for food - or just to speculate.

Food investments may drive Qatar's sovereign wealth fund to look at Latin America as an important investment destination

Western Gulf Advisory, a Bahrain-Zurich based company, plans to invest $1 billion into the Australian economy, including farm acquisitions, over the next few years.

The State has stepped up the drive to buy idle land to make available to investors, hoping to snap up vast fallow land across the Rift Valley and Coast provinces and towns near Nairobi.

Human rights workers said risks to the rural poor over such deals are significant because they are regularly evicted to make way for foreign investors.

At a two-day conference near the Moroccan capital Rabat, local officials sought to convince Gulf investors that heavy bureaucracy and complex land ownership rules, long seen as decisive obstacles, are a thing of the past.

Swedish company Black Earth Farming (BEF) since 2006 has bought 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres) of Russian farmland after the government finally allowed land to be privatised after decades of state ownership.

Suicide is becoming a common reality in Barreirinhas, as families are talked into “renting” their land to the sugar cane companies.

Slater reckons shortages of soft commodities and the likelihood of rising inflation make farmland an excellent investment, not least in Brazil where Agrifirma is located.

Private equity used to stay away from anything to do with agriculture, put off by the uncontrollable risks of bad climate and natural disasters. And yet in the last three years some big funds have been launched in the agribusiness space, and they are busy trying different ways of mitigating the risks.

Neo-colonialists are buying up agricultural land in Africa – and local farmers could be crushed unless there are international rules to protect them.

Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.

Tenant farming was popular in rural America until the Dust Bowl years of the Depression, but the practice is making a comeback on an epic scale in much of Africa.

Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots as they bet on rising food prices by buying farms.

A venture backed by Canada’s PSP Investments has bought out its co-investors in the Kooba aggregation in New South Wales, which has 30,000 hectares of cotton, crops and livestock and 1,400 hectares of almond orchards.

Two prominent union leaders who were not present when the Salala Rubber Corporation buildings were set on fire have been jailed as retaliation for their efforts to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for the plantation’s contract workers.

Qantas Super plans to generate a higher proportion of returns from the agricultural sector after committing $200 million to the development of high-yielding horticultural crops on properties managed by farmland investor goFARM.

Steve Dyer is executive director of Semper Fund Management, a $100M company that was founded in 2019 with partner Ciro Echesortu, former CEO of Louis Dreyfus Company, to seize the unique opportunity in US farmland investment.

Farmers from different communities in the Ondo West Local Government Area of Ondo State took to the streets in protest against the alleged decision of the state government to take over their farmlands for leasing to a Chinese company.

Defence Front for the Interests of Santa Clara de Uchunya condemn the smear campaign of the company Ocho Sur and demand its withdrawal from their ancestral territory

Russia could provide North Korean farmers with agricultural land in the Far East, a scheme that one expert said could be a DPRK attempt to improve its food situation and earn cash for the regime.

Local ranchers, joined by Harvard students, oppose university’s plans to build reservoirs at Its large vineyard in California.

An investigation by Mongabay, The Gecko Project and BBC News found villagers across Indonesia gave up their land to corporations in exchange for a share of the palm oil boom but have been left with empty promises. Tom Walker, head of research at The Gecko Project, argues that increasing transparency, accountability and investigations of errant companies are critical steps that could be taken to solve the problem.

As soon as the rice is harvested, the corn is seeded; three months later it’s watermelons then bananas, cash crops grown year round on farms in Laos rented by Chinese investors to feed China’s insatiable appetite for fresh produce.

Over the past five years, at least two people from rural communities have been killed weekly in the struggles against land grabs, based on estimates by the Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific

Advocates of large-scale, intensive industrial agriculture are saying, yet again, that we should ramp up global production to deal with the food crisis. But this is not the solution.