The Ethiopian Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development recently released the Land Rent Contractual Agreements for land leases between the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (FDRE) and twenty-four companies or individuals.

Report on the growing popularity of farmland investment in the developing world for European pension funds

A new class of farmers is on the rise in Ukraine. Three articles about the situation with foreign investors taking control of the country's farmlands.

A clause in the 2023 budget states that "it is expected that large parcels of unutilised/unproductively used lands will be leased out on long-term basis to grow exportable crops"

A new report from the Oakland Institute, reveals that several well-known pension funds, trusts and endowments are invested in a group of oil palm plantations in the Democratic Republic of Congo accused of environmental and human rights abuses.

Thousands of families are being violently evicted from their farms to make way for foreign-owned plantations in Kiryandongo, Uganda.

The project leaders of Wanbao Africa Agriculture Development Limited seemed to have an emerging-market hubris every bit as blinding as that of their colonial predecessors.

Ernst Janovsky, head of agribusiness at Barclays Africa, says curbs on foreign land ownership in many countries are the biggest deterrent to attracting foreign capital.

African agriculture has a big investment problem: lots of private equity interest but few opportunities because most farms and companies are too small to absorb the cash or provide attractive returns.

February 2012 workshop in Ouidah, Benin brought together over thirty participants from farmer organisations and NGOs in West and Central Africa to share experiences and analysis of land grabs.

Jim Rogers, the co-founder with George Soros of the Quantum hedge fund, is particularly bullish about agriculture saying that shortages in a range of agricultural products will produce strong prices not only in those commodities but also in farm land.

A new report published this week claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their traditional lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by European hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food.

Institutions including Harvard and Vanderbilt reportedly use hedge funds to buy land in deals that may force farmers out.

The fervour with which foreign commercial interests are forcing their agricultural 'solutions' on the African continent represents nothing more than an established endeavour to protect profits and access to resources.

Agrifirma Brazil, a farm fund backed by Lord Rothschild and Jim Slater, the former corporate raider, is scrapping its hedge fund-style fees to make it easier to attract investors. Agrifirma owns more than 100,000 acres of Brazilian farmland.

In Congo-Brazzaville, tree planting projects intended for carbon markets have proliferated over the past four years, with large-scale monocultures initiated by oil companies under the seductive term of carbon neutrality and promises of job creation for communities.

Tumbling corn and soybean prices are sparking defaults, undermining returns for so-called Fiagros, the Brazilian investment funds backed by agricultural receivables such as interest, dividends and land-lease payments.

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.

Article analyses the effects on local actors, their land access, land use and tenure security of a large-scale land deal in northern Laos that a Chinese company initiated but subsequently abandoned.

This notorious palm oil industry has now expanded to Myanmar with devastating consequences for human rights and the environment

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

Agriculture has scarred some big hitters in the investment world. Many are now wary of a sector that is at the mercy of fickle weather, political risk and quixotic governments.

The scariest aspect of this unfolding phenomenon is that despite the foreseeable terrible consequences, the appetite among the rich countries to own a piece of this developing-country fertile land continues to grow, turning to an ugly competition.

Since 1999, The Ingleby Company has bought about 17 farms. The company runs just under 20,000ha of land with 130,000 stock units, most of which are sheep and cattle.

The Gulf’s dispossession of African land for carbon offset projects is key to its efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways.

As the lands of traditional palm oil powerhouses like Indonesia and Malaysia have become saturated with plantations, companies looking to profit have turned to areas of tropical forest elsewhere – like Papua New Guinea.

Principles for responsible agriculture investment are stock templates, designed to deflect the fallout from a growing number of media reports of land deals between investors and governments.

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.

A Ugandan villager is in a three-way legal battle for ownership of land with a sugar company that wants to expand its plantations and the National Forestry Authority, which says it is part of a forest reserve.

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.