The Rohatyn Group , a private equity firm based in New York, is now the largest owner of agricultural land in the state of Michigan, making acquisitions through offshore companies registered in Singapore
The bigger question—one Tasmania must answer soon—is how much of its food-bowl can be outsourced to balance sheets before community cohesion snaps.
Under the guise of ‘conflict mediation’ and community empowerment, the work of certain corporate NGOs results in communities continuing without access to and control over their lands, and in strengthening destructive production models.
Hubert Fabri and Vincent Bolloré own plantations accused of land appropriation and labor abuses. Their company says it has taken steps to improve matters, but a trip to West Africa shows sexual coercion claims remain widespread.
On April 3, 89 civil society organizations signed a joint statement calling on the IFC and the EBRD to ensure remedy and accountability, for the severe and systemic violations at Indorama Agro cotton project, Uzbekistan. In 2019, a presidential decree allocating 50,000 hectares of land to Indorama Agro resulted in the arbitrary termination of thousands of farmers’ land leases without free, prior and informed consent.
What can possibly be wrong about planting trees? This investigation digs deeper into a conflict unfolding in southern Madagascar, between the local community and an Italian multinational. As similar green projects multiply, this case highlights a critical challenge.
There is an increasing demand for nature-based solutions and real assets are of particular interest to institutional asset owners. But just because something is a natural investment does not always mean it is good for the environment. Or that it is a good investment.
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.
New York-based hedge fund Water Asset Management LLC spent $100 million to buy farmland and water rights in Western Arizona, stirring concerns about a future “water grab” from that rural area and of corporate control over a major groundwater source.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fiagros are a new type of fund that can allow foreigners to circumvent legal restrictions and acquire land in Brazil.
Some of the world's largest pension funds bet big on Brazilian farmland. Communities, and the climate, are paying the price
While farmers across Europe protest high costs and foreign competition, agribusiness investors continue to fortify their positions in the Spanish and European agricultural sector.
Cibus Capital intends to buy degraded land and generate revenue with regenerative agriculture, sustainable timber, carbon credits or by making it more productive before selling it.
New York-based African Agriculture Holdings went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange on December 7, 2023. This new business venture plans to operate on over 2.9 million hectares in Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal to produce animal feed for export and sell carbon credits for corporations seeking to offset their carbon emissions.
The strategy for Lombard Odier is to create nature-based investment assets by deploying capital into monoculture coffee plantations near forests and to re-forest them, creating shaded, biodiverse agroforests.
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.
The Stop Harvard Land Grabs Coalition reiterated calls for the University to provide reparations to residents impacted by former holdings in Brazilian farmlands at an annual hybrid panel on Wednesday.
Researchers say the construction of a dam and sugarcane plantations has dispossessed the Lower Omo’s peoples of their farming and grazing lands and irreversibly altered the natural cycles of the Omo River.
Comprising 9,000 hectares in the heart of Uruguay, the farm, which produces beef cattle, soybeans, rice, and timber, was sold to an undisclosed European family office
Farmland purchases by the Harvard endowment contributed to a climate of anxiety, fear, and strain on Brazilian subsistence farmers.
Banks, pension funds and insurers have been turning California's scarce water into enormous profits, leaving people with less to drink
The case is emblematic of the spate of land grabs targeting unallocated public lands throughout the Amazon, where speculators clear and burn the vegetation, then sell the empty land for soy farms.
NFFC says that a new “land grab” is underway in the US, with Wall Street investors, pension funds, and other financiers looking for a safe place to park their money and turning to farmlands as their preferred investment.
Communities say a SOCFIN subsidiary used a $10M loan from the World Bank's IFC to turn the forests where they’d farmed and held sacred rituals into a massive rubber plantation.
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.
As the palm oil industry swept through Indonesia, it transformed millions of hectares of land into plantations. An opaque system supposed to improve rural livelihoods has left villagers waiting for profits — and answers.
