A Chinese property conglomerate is bidding for a 15,000 hectare farming project in the Australian outback as Canberra looks to open the remote north for farming to tap booming demand for food from Asia, especially China.

Investors from Canada and the Netherlands have almost half of all foreign forest and farmland holdings in the USA. The Canadian holdings reflect investment by timber companies, while the Dutch holdings reflect pension fund investments.

Cambodia is a microcosm of a violent struggle playing out across the globe for control of a shrinking – and therefore increasingly valuable – pool of natural resources.

The chief of Harvard University’s $32 billion endowment said the fund has been eyeing timberland, farmland, infrastructure, energy and water-related investments in anticipation of growing global demand.

Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that. Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage than most people realize.

Dominion Farms will start planting rice in December 2012 on its 30,000 ha rice farm in Taraba and has trained 50 commercial farmers in Kenya who will soon start their own commercial rice operations in Nigeria.

Charoen Pokphand Group plans to invest $550 million within the next three years to develop maize and rice farms, rice mills and livestock processing plants.

A senior government official in Serenje has urged the Zambia Development Agency to quicken the process of facilitating investment inflow in the 155,000-hectare Nansanga farm block in Central Province.

For years, Romania has been a playground for foreign investors. Drawn by the vast amounts of available land, along with prices lower than in the rest of Europe, more than 700 000 hectares of land are now owned by foreign investors.

The Cambodian government has cancelled a 14,981-hectare concession in the Cardamom mountains granted to an Australian firm for a banana plantation.

In the last five years, land concessions totaling tens of thousands of hectares have been granted to private companies for industrial sugarcane production in Cambodia.

Drought conditions in much of the US this year could turn into a boon, rather than a bust, for institutional investors in farmland, timber and agricultural stocks.