The Republic of Congo has handed over 80,000 ha of arable land to a company owned and operated by 14 South African farmers.

Parliament is calling on the Productivity Commission to review the recent surge in foreign investment in farming, focusing on its effects on the economy and food security.

Investors are buying Canadian agricultural land, betting that rising food prices, a ballooning global population and growing worldwide scarcities in farmland will mean a payoff for them.

David Murrin, CIO at Emergent Asset Management, stresses the difficulties of jumping aboard the African growth story. "It is very hard to take advantage of the tremendous growth in African agriculture and that's why private equity investment is so important, it helps capture some of that growth," he says.

Foreign investment in Australia's food chain is increasing at a rate that is causing concern, and not just for people on the land.

In Ethiopia, resentments over land grab have already started claiming lives. The TPLF regime has already killed 10 protesting ethnic Anuak farmers and has sent thousands more to concentration camps.

Finding suitable farmland investment vehicles is not as easy as one might think.

The seizing of the poor farmers' land is destroying their only hope of survival on earth.

Bangladeshi authorities have started exploring new options to ensure the country's food security such as taking lease of vast areas of fallow agricultural land in the neighbouring Myanmar and in some African states.

Gulf nations need to step up investments in African and South East Asian farmland if the region is to play its part in averting a global food crisis, agriculture experts say.

Government has taken action to resolve lingering speculation and strengthen transparency surrounding the degree of foreign ownership in Australian agriculture.

Australia's center-left Labor government said Tuesday it will examine foreign ownership of the country's rural land and agricultural food production in response to a spate of takeovers that have triggered anxiety about job losses and broader concerns about food security.

Recent business delegations from Iran and Qatar expressed strong interest in buying farmland in Uruguay to develop their own production projects.

India and Mauritius have resumed discussions over a proposal to hand over the twin islands of Agalega to India for tourism development and possibly agriculture.

African governments should avoid rushing into big land lease deals with foreign investors or risk deepening poverty and ramping up social tensions, an official at the UN's Food and Agriculture Office said

The anxiety expressed in some farming quarters and the daily media about Australian farms becoming dominated by foreign corporations and governments fails to recognise that the coming and going of overseas investors has always been part of rural property transactions.

Wary of fluctuations on Wall Street, more wealthy Americans, private funds and foreigners are putting money into parcels of cornfields, fruit orchards and other US agricultural products.

Egypt will soon offer to lease, for 49 years, 50,000 feddans [21,000 ha] for agri-business projects in North Sinai, the irrigation minister said -- but only to domestic investors.

In Cambodia, an assessment of the impact of foreign farmland acquisitions has been hampered by a lack of data, including the total number of concessions awarded and an accurate set of GPS coordinates for each concession, the World Bank says.

Brazil shocked foreign investors when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he was concerned about Brazilian land falling into foreign hands.

ASSOCHAM, India's apex industry body, has sent a proposal to the external affairs ministry offering to act as facilitator to help Indian farmers get farmland in Africa.

Africa's untapped agriculture potential make it an ideal partner for resource-constrained Middle Eastern countries that seek to improve their food security, a new report from Standard Chartered Bank said.

"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.

Evidence suggests a marked disparity in the benefits received by those involved in and affected by these transnational land acquisitions, particularly for those originally dwelling on the land.

A tribe of hunter gatherers living in trees in the forests of Papua, near the planned Merauke food estate where Wilmar and other firms plan to get farmland, has been discovered officially for the first time.

SilverStreet is scouting for commercial farms in five countries — Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Vaughan-Smith and his team of seven professionals are scouting for commercial farms in five countries — Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia — where conditions are deemed to be the most favorable.

"Local businessmen make deals with foreign investors and convince tribal authorities in the area to give them land, but the water from the river is not just for people to take," says Water Affairs Under Secretary A. Nehemia who had not been informed about the farm.

Farms of foreign owners control more than 6 percent of the total Czech farmland area of 3.6 million hectares, weekly Euro says in its latest issue to be published on Monday, referring to data of the Czech Statistical Office

Saudi Arabian Agriculture Minister Fahd Bin Abdul-rahman Bin Sulaiman Balghunaim said at the summit that Saudi Arabia was planning to invest in Algeria's agriculture, like Egypt and Sudan.