The scale and pace of the large scale acquisition of land — or land grabbing — in the developing world in the last decade is unprecedented and is having disastrous consequences for the world’s poor.
A Chinese company isn’t buying Smithfield. A shell company based in Cayman Islands is. Instead of a story about “China buying up the world”, this turns out to be a story of a precarious leveraged buyout deal by some large global private equity firms looking to borrow their way to a fortune.
Concerns mount among civil society groups that an agriculture project in Mozambique, which Tokyo is pushing through as one of its key projects in Africa, may end up depriving local farmers of their land.
Mozambican Minister suggests "illiterate" farmers were not behind letter to President denouncing trilateral agribusiness project backed by Japan and Brazil.
As gender gains attention in the agricultural world, data and information show women as major players in food production. Over 60% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are employed in agriculture. And according to Oxfam, “women produce more than half of all the food grown in the world.”
Overseas land acquisitions are rising, with people pushed off their land and into poverty; let's not pretend that's migration.
Groups around the world accuse European business magnates Vincent Bolloré and Hubert Fabri of using intimidation to silence local opposition to an African land grab.
Japanese trading house Mitsubishi Corp plans to acquire a majority stake in Brazilian grain company Los Grobo Ceagro do Brasil in a deal worth about 50 billion yen (US$495 million)
The slow progress of Karuturi Global and similar projects has prompted the Ethiopian government to reassess its policy of leasing vast tracts of land to single investors.
Government of Philippines offers Indonesian state-owned plantations company BUMN to develop palm oil plantations in Mindanao on an area of 120,000 ha.
If the Chinese government is to achieve its goal of accelerated urbanization, one issue it must deal with is food security. As China has developed more of its land, concerns have developed over whether enough arable land will be available to produce enough food to feed its massive population.
Algeria is to open up its farming sector to foreign investors for the first time to try to help cut food imports and also diversify its economy.