Russia

Two of the world's biggest land investors - Saudi Arabia and South Korea - have announced moves to improve their food security. A South Korean company is to buy 125,000 acres in Russia over the next four years and a Saudi group has set up a £600m fund to buy land.

Le premier constructeur naval sud-coréen, Hyundai Heavy Industries, vient d'annoncer sa participation à l'effort national pour sécuriser les ressources alimentaires du pays. HHI vient d'acquérir 67,6% des parts de Khorol Zerno, propriétaire et exploitant de 10000 hectares de terres agricoles dans le grand est russe, dans la région de Khorolski.

South Korea's largest shipbuilder, Hyundai Heavy Industries, announced it will buy a big tract of Russian farmland in the latest move by Korean firms to help their crowded country secure stable food supplies.

South Korea, Asia’s second-biggest grain importer, will lend money and give technology to companies to develop farms overseas to ensure the nation’s food security after prices surged last year.

"We are seeing a land grab bigger than anywhere else in the world, and it has attracted a mighty cast of characters," says Kingsmill Bond, chief strategist at Troika Dialog, a Moscow brokerage firm.

Faced with high land values and falling milk prices at home, a growing number of New Zealand dairy farmers are investing in South America, the United States, eastern Europe and Russia.

Nomadic herders, rarely a priority for governments, are being dispossessed by bioethanol developments in Kenya, says Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition (ILC), and they also depend on the “unused” land that Madagascar offered Daewoo.

Investors are pouring billions into Russian agribusiness—and trying to reverse decades of Soviet mismanagement.

The deputy leader of the Democratic Left Party (DSP) Turkey has stated that Turkey possesses some great advantages in agriculture, despite the major problems that remain in place in the sector, but emphasized that it is a mistake to sell agricultural land to foreigners.

"Jilin and other corporate entities in China are taking major steps to increase the amount of China-controlled soy plantation both in China and around the world," reports the US Consulate in Shenyang

Lured by soaring food prices, corporations - both domestic and foreign - have been snapping up land in this fertile region the size of France, replacing inefficient Soviet-style collective farming with modern farming techniques and economies of scale.

“Foreigners who come here get astonished at the gleaming black earth,” said Viktor Karnushin, head of a local subsidiary of Sweden’s Black Earth Farming corporation, one of the biggest foreign players in Russian farming.