An open letter has been sent to the AfDB and Nordic Development Fund, calling on them to take immediate action to address reprisals against a community in Uganda impacted by the Wadelai irrigation project.

The 9th Brussels Development Briefing took place on 25th February 2009 in Brussels on “Land access and rural development: New challenges, new opportunities” and discussed the links between property rights, investment and the generation of economic opportunities in rural areas.

Canada's Blended Finance Project interviews Witness Radio and GRAIN about the role public development banks play in facilitating land grabs around the world.

Thirty CSOs call on the governments responsible for overseeing the development banks to take action to redress the harms caused to the communities from their investment oil palm plantation company PHC/Feronia.

On the eve of an annual gathering of public development banks, 280 groups from 70 countries sign letter slamming them for bankrolling the expansion of industrial agriculture.

A new report by an alliance of civil society organisations chronicles one of the most scandalous failures of development bank investment in agriculture.

As development banks gather for a global summit, organisations condemn the financing of corporate agribusiness and plantations, and call for public investment in agroecology and local food systems to tackle the climate crisis.

European MPs issue an interparliamentary statement on the “Finance in common summit”, calling on public development banks to stop "harmful investments", such as those in the oil palm plantation company Feronia in the DR Congo.

The Feronia case, and other development bank investment failures, shows that there is a need to overhaul development finance institutions practices and to consider whether it might be better to just shut them down entirely.

The communities of the DR Congo want a resolution to a land conflict that dates back to the Belgian colonial period with a palm oil company that is currently being financed by a consortium of European development banks led by DEG.

The Egyptian Countryside Development Company and the Italian Ambassador to Egypt discussed cooperation and strategies to attract Italian investments to the lands and sectors of the 630,000 ha agricultural project.

The Dutch development bank FMO says its investments promote oil palm plantations in local communities. But the local communities are not welcoming these plantations. They want their land back.

Launch of the report and debate between the authors and international experts on development finance

A new report by the UN Human Rights Office gives guidance to development finance institutions to ensure that the projects they finance do not harm people, and that effective remedy is readily available for any potential victims.

Four European development banks are financing a palm oil company in the Democratic Republic of Congo that is violating workers’ rights and dumping untreated waste, says a report by Human Rights Watch.

The UK development bank has been accused of failing to protect workers from exposure to dangerous pesticides and paying “extreme poverty” wages on palm oil plantations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Two Chinese media firms – China Agriculture Film and Television Center and Global Max Media Group – co-hosted the China Africa Agriculture Co-operation and Development Summit in Lusaka.

The German government supports companies like M3-SA, which are responsible for large scale land grabbing, by providing loans – in this case through the African Development Bank and the DEG (Deutsche Entwicklungsgesellschaft).

Logging operations are only ramping up, and exploiting special leases, meant for the development of agricultural projects, to clear forest on land belonging to customary owners.

New book, “Palms of controversies: Oil palm and development challenges,” says the problems is not the oil palm but the way people have chosen to exploit it.

The 2-minute animation 'There You Go!' shows how 'development' can rob self-sufficient tribal people of their land, livelihood and pride, and turn them into beggars.

Japanese experts provide an analysis of the ProSavana project's concept note for the development of a large-scale agricultural project in Northern Mozambique.

We need to shift our focus away from the question of how to make large-scale land “investments” sustainable and ask the underlying question of development policy: which strategies are best suited to combat hunger and to empower marginalised groups to feed themselves?

While much debate and analysis have focused on the social and environmental impacts of the ‘land grabbing’ phenomenon, the legal and development implications still remain understudied.

The cases of Norwegian development cooperation covered in the report include the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania and the Agrica – Kilombero Plantation Ltd. rice farm in Tanzania

New report: European and US development funds are bankrolling palm oil company Feronia Inc despite land and labour conflicts at its plantations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Resistance to the controversial agricultural development programme in the Nacala corridor in the north of Mozambique is part of the broader forms of resistance sweeping across the country.

Right now, on the desks of Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) there is the background material for an application of credit guarantee for an 8000 ha sugar plantation and a refinery in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

Presentations from a meeting organised by the Global Donor Platform on Rural Development and FAO/SDC/IFAD, where today's largescale farmland acquisitions figured high on the agenda

Amr Abdel Wahab, chairperson and managing director of the Egyptian Countryside Development Company, signed an investment contract with Al Magd Group for a 29,000-feddan area for the large-scale cultivation of oil seed crops