Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments), the largest foreign institutional investor in Australian agriculture, has acquired more than 8,000 hectares of farmland in New South Wales from Duxton Farms for A$70m.

He urged them to take advantage of their status and position in the community to regularly communicate government policies and programmes to their people, mobilize support for new investments, and act as mediators where required to ensure peaceful co-existence between businesses and communities.

This LDPI Working Paper Series includes work in progress presented at the 2024 Global Land Grabbing Conference in Bogotá, addressing urgent challenges related to land, water, and natural resource grabbing.

In a fresh push to have the lands reverted to local communities, Henry Belsoi, a resident of Chesoen in Bomet Central said the leases held by Unilever and other multinational tea companies should have ended after the declaration of independence in 1963.

A recent gathering in Colombia, organized by the Land Deal Politics Initiative, was an important moment to assess the current state of play and ready strategies to face the current and impending onslaught of land grabs.

This new white paper titled The Evolution of Farmland as an Asset, released by Steve Bruere, president, Peoples Company, and Ailie C. Elmore, instructor, University of Illinois, takes you behind the curtain, not only recounting the history of farmland investment, but examining why events occurred, and how those events drove, and are continuing to drive, the development of a promising and worthy asset class.

The transferability of land, along with the liberalisation of agriculture and finance the Bank and IMF have pushed on Global South states, have facilitated investment in agribusiness and driven the financialisation of national agricultural sectors.

The Agriculture Investment Conference intends to lure Malawian emerging mega farmers to invest in commercial farming by introducing them to various profitable agricultural value chains and the respective off-taker markets.

The government says under the amended land laws, foreign nationals will be allowed to buy land in the country for investment purposes only.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan portfolio now includes 130,000 acres of agricultural land globally, from apple orchards to row crop farmland and aquaculture assets, in Australia, Chile, Canada, the US and Portugal

The World Bank’s independent watchdog, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), has finalized its investigation into a complaint filed five years ago, alleging grave human rights violations by communities living near the Salala Rubber Corporation in Liberia.

NGOs say a development bank mediation process is coercing communities into foregoing their rights to their territories and accepting a palm oil company's occupation of their lands without the time, resources, security and legal support required to adequately defend their interests.

Des ONG affirment qu'un processus de médiation des banques de développement allemande et néerlandaise contraint des communautés à renoncer à leurs droits fonciers et à accepter l'occupation continue de leurs terres par une société de huile de palme, sans avoir eu le temps, les ressources, la sécurité et le soutien juridique nécessaires pour défendre leurs intérêts.

The manner in which African Agriculture acquired rights to operate within the Ndiael Reserve has raised eyebrows. Local herders, whose livelihoods depend on the reserve’s resources, now face displacement and restricted access to water and grazing lands.

Donor-designed forest carbon projects and private sector companies like Burapha Agro-Forestry are facing insurmountable challenges from an age-old problem: land tenure insecurity.

At COP28 in Dubai, Nigeria's National Council for Climate Change signed an agreement with France's aDryada for carbon investment projects with Osun State (reforestation of 20,000 ha) and Cross River State (57,000 ha of mangrove restoration).

AAM Investment Group has sold its 14,074ha Sunshine Farms Aggregation in the Lachlan Valley of New South Wales for an undisclosed sum and the buyer is believed to be the US pension fund manager Nuveen.

In a move to bolster Bahrain’s agri-food sector and address food security challenges, Mumtalakat, the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund, yesterday announced the establishment of the Bahrain Food Holding Company.

Los Angeles-based Aliment Capital has invested in US-based, Agrovision which has large-scale berry and grape plantations in Peru, Mexico, Morocco and the US.

Haishan Group, a private Beijing-based construction firm with farming operations in Angola, has announced its involvement in the construction of a 300-hectare real estate and fishery industrial park featuring aquaculture, seafood processing, and feed production facilities.

Globe-trotting billionaire Mo Dewji made a fortune in East Africa selling palm oil, rope, and soda. Now he says he's trying to acquire 100,000 ha in Rufiji and another part of Tanzania for sugarcane and cereal plantations.

The People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty has adopted Day of the Landless in 2018 as an annual global action to give spotlight on the issue of global landlessness and highlight the land struggles of rural peoples in the Global South.

Palm oil companies in Indonesia, the world’s top producer of the commodity, cleared 30,000 ha of forest last year to make way for plantations. France-based TheTreeMap used plantation concession data from Greenpeace to identify 53 companies behind the plantation expansion and resulting deforestation, of which 20 had cleared carbon-rich peatlands.

A new study identifies around 18m hectares of land in Cambodia, Colombia and the DRC that have been acquired in large-scale deals for logging, intensive agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction and mining.

At least 30 residents have been charged by provincial court in Cambodia for allegedly illegally occupying state land. The detention stems from an incident when authorities mounted a mass crackdown during a clash over a long-disputed land. The authorities said the land belonged to a rubber company called Seladamex, having received an economic land concession (ELC) from the state.

The Company intends to expand operations in Sierra Leone and will transfer the same model to Ghana and Liberia and other countries across Africa, where approximately 90% of land suitable for restoration is held by smallholders.

While top executives stand accused of multimillion dollar fraud, communities living near the plantations suffer from being deprived of their lands and violent harassment by PHC’s security forces.

Saudi Arabia and South Africa discussed agriculture investment possibilities following agreement on a protocol for red meat exports, with the South African side aiming to expand domestic production on over 2 million hectares.

Eni is pursuing agricultural production for biofuels in six African countries, including the Republic of the Congo where collaboration with ‘Big Agri’ companies risks land dispossession and environmental degradation.

Purchase of Australia's largest fruit grower by Driscoll's and US and Canadian private equity and pension funds includes six blueberry farms in Morocco and four berry farms in China.