UK

“Zuia uporaji wa ardhi,” reads the Swahili headline of a poster on the wall of the community building in Mhaga, a densely populated village in Kisarawe, a district 100km southwest of Dar es Salaam. It means “prevent land grabbing”

UK-based investors are planning a $400 million rural land fund to buy cotton and wheat properties in eastern Australia.

As the global financial downturn pushes investors into finding alternative business ventures, land investment has become an attractive proposition.

"I wonder if greater returns could come for Africa if attention were paid to backing the continent’s millions of smallholders? And yet, as I speak, many are being driven off their land and swelling the ranks of the urban dispossessed."

More than 613,000 hectares of Australia's NSW's agricultural land is owned by UK-based investors, compared with 227,300 ha owned by Korean interests and 55,560 ha by US investors.

The French Development Agency and the UK-based Emergent Asset Management have been named as the leading investors in massive land deals involving African leaders

Synthesis report from the World Agriculture Investment Conference, London, UK, 4-5 October.

CDC, the UK’s development finance institution, today announced a US$20m investment in farming businesses in Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Uganda

Commodities investor Jim Rogers has been appointed to the board of the farmland investment firm Genagro Ltd

The EU lured many multinational energy companies such as SBF to invest in renewable energies in developing countries such Tanzania where almost all projects are on the verge of collapse or shut down.

Land investments displace rural populations, often without any notice, and diminish their access to land, jobs, and food.

"As investors we always want to be on the correct side of global macro trends, and whatever China needs or is buying lots of, we want to own as investments."