Land is becoming increasingly more coveted by transnational agribusiness and financial investors.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority has taken Sierra Leone farmland investor Capital Alternatives to the High Court for “promoting and/or operating collective investment schemes (CISs) in the UK illegally and without our authorisation”.

The potential for bottom-line financial damage from insecure land tenure risk range from massively increased operating costs – as much as 29 times over a normal baseline scenario, according to our modeling – to outright abandonment of an up-and-running operation.

In an exclusive telephone interview during her visit to Riyadh on Tuesday, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo focused on measures by her country to strengthen economic ties with the Kingdom.

A real financialisation of land, natural resources and the agri-food system is underway throughout South America. In the context of the multiple global crises, the pressure on the control of land and other resources of interest has increased considerably, either for productive use or as financial assets. To this end, the digitisation of land governance and the georeferencing technology that supports it are serving to disguise a massive digital land grab.

On 18 November 2008, The Financial Times exposed a massive deal being negotiated between Daewoo Logistics and the government of Madagascar. Ten years later, what are we seeing?

Palmer was central to the debate on “land grabbing” that followed the financial, food and energy crises of 2007-08. He passed away on February 19, 2023.

Money from pension funds has fuelled the financial sector's massive move into farmland investing over the past decade. The number of pension funds involved in farmland investment and the amount of money they are deploying into it is increasing, under the radar.

The agribusiness managed investment scheme sector is not expected to escape the economic downturn that has hit the financial services industry.

Food commodity prices remain near historic highs. Food riots destablised countries around the world last year – more than the financial crisis – and may well return. If food was ever a soft policy issue before, it now rivals oil as a basis of power and economic security.

Ahead of the World Bank’s 2025 Land Conference starting on May 5th in Washington D.C., a new Oakland Institute report exposes how the financial institution is using the pretext of climate crisis to push a global land “reform” agenda that favors corporate interests at the expense of people and the planet.

Since the financial and food crises of 2008, the World Bank Group has incentivized and facilitated land grabs in several countries in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia.

There will be plenty more scuffles between local populations and new global landlords. But, according to the Financial Times, such fights are unlikely to stem the tide of land investment.

The EBRD makes a US$45 million equity investment in KazExportAstyk, which controls 1m hectares of agricultural land in Kazakhstan – an area about the size of Denmark.

Operations at Karuturi flower farm in Naivasha, Kenya, have been paralyzed due to a financial crisis.

Mr Rosslenbroich is particularly enthusiastic about agriculture, where he says Aquila has “teams travelling the world looking for farms”, with New Zealand dairy farms a speciality.

A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs

Everywhere in Africa the story is more or less the same: communal rights are being grossly interfered with, farming systems upturned, livelihoods decimated, and water use and environments changed in ways which are dubiously sustainable.

Only legal recognition of commons as the communal property of communities is sufficient to afford real protection, writes Liz Alden Wily

At the current stage, we do not have adequately available evidence to consider either HMC or Emergent at fault for the purported economic wrongdoings outlined in the Oakland Institute report.

The GCC states are rapidly pursuing contracts for the purchase of land from eastern Africa to Vietnam to guarantee ample food supplies

The truth is that if exploitation of a developing country’s natural resources by the West is colonialism, so it is when rich countries of the South do the same.

“The Emiratis are farming and have withdrawn so much water from the ground that the entire town of Wenden has sunk by four feet,”

Holding the Development Finance Institutions responsible when private sector projects fail. The case of Addax Bioethanol in Sierra Leone.

Australian Ag Minister supports banning all foreign governments and foreign state-owned companies from buying Australian farmland, saying such acquisitions could “undermine the national interest”.

As large-scale investors' interest in acquiring vast swathes of land for commercial agriculture in Africa intensifies, farmers believe the time is ripe for the government to press investors to allocate shares to villagers as a corporate social responsibility.

On the occasion of the publication of Transnational Corporations and Land Speculation in Brazil, Mary Taylor of LeftEast spoke with Fábio Pitta, Devlin Kuyek and Attila Szőcs about the broader implications of the report's findings.

Discussion paper for the workshop ‘Mapping the State of Play on the Global Food Landscape’ Waterloo, 25-27 September 2014.

While NGO pressure has had some impact on speculative investments in agricultural commodities, financial institutions still seem to be very attached to their farmland investments.

The G77 and China have alerted the UN General Assembly to the emerging trend of “massive acquisition by large investors from developed countries of farm land in developing countries”. The farm land is being bought not for food security, but for the speculative purpose of future agricultural production, which thus creates a significant added burden to food insecurity globally.