Given the power imbalances at play, it is folly to assume that land-seekers will suddenly embrace, en masse, a set of voluntary rules promoting sustainable and equitable investor practices, says Michael Kugelman
HighQuest Partners in the US say that between 65-80 million hectares of additional land is going to have to be brought into production, globally, within the next 10 years and that this means more foreign farmland investment.
Following a two-day conference in Libreville, Gabon, civil society actors launched a land and resource rights initiative to challenge property laws and continuing allocation of community lands to logging, mining and agribusiness.
Everyone seems to agree on the need for “investment” in agriculture to fight hunger and support rural development, but the focus is exclusively on investment funds and big business, and nothing about farmers. Is the term part of a disinformation campaign to serve the interests of only a few?
The Government of Uganda has been asked by Members of Parliament to make the process of acquiring land for investments more transparent.
Investors are honing the focus of their cash on real assets including farmland, timber, mines and energy projects, which are less correlated to financial markets.
The Obama model's first project in Mozambique will be to support Cargill, the giant grain trader and largest private company in the world, to take 40,000 hectares of farmland.
With communal land associations communities will be having one voice and if anybody, be it government or investor, is interested in their land, that person is made aware of that the group is organized and therefore not easy to simply deploy graders to start tiling or clearing the land.
A massive land grab has occurred in Papua New Guinea under the auspices of the Special Agricultural and Business Leases scheme, and the impact on communities across the country has been devastating. Greenpeace has produced a new report that details the extent of the damage.
There's growing interest in who invests in Australian companies and who buys Australian land, with more discussion around the topic of global food security.
Indigenous peoples in Sarawak, Malaysia are facing an escalation of land grabbing in their territories by national palm oil companies, backed by foreign corporations.
Villagers in Mozambique are caught between their government's need to promote agricultural development through foreign investment and to protect the rights of the citizens who depend on that land.