The global rush to buy farmland continues, and international investors are focusing on the poorest countries with weak land-rights security for deals, according to a report by the Land Matrix research group.

The World Bank and Wall Street firms targeted for African land deals displacing hundreds of thousands.

Exploring the fundamental data flaws in the Land Matrix dataset

The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate is a vast mega-project, a plan for over a million hectares of plantations and industrialised agriculture that threatens the people and environment across the southern part of West Papua. Indonesian and foreign companies have each claimed their share of the land, and offer the local Malind people next-to-nothing in exchange for the forest that has sustained them for countless generations.

An international coalition of NGOs and research groups has published the world's largest database of land grab deals struck since 2000, offering unprecedented detail on who's investing, where and what for.

In 2009 Dororthy Dyton and about 2,000 other subsistence farmers in southern Malawi’s Chikhwawa District were informed by their local chief that the land had been sold and they could no longer cultivate there.

Land rights are essentially political issues; but where women’s land rights are concerned, the solutions take on a legal dimension.

This policy brief gives a brief overview of the available evidence of large-scale Chinese investment in agriculture, then discusses the extent to which the purpose of such investment is to export produce back to China.

Some CSOs are using the media to paint an inaccurate and distorted picture of the World Bank Group’s work and they are questioning the motives of the conference, says the World Bank's Klaus Deininger.

The processes of concentration, foreign ownership and land degradation came to be a central concern of supranational bodies and NGOs that warn of the “negative effects of these phenomena on food security, agricultural employment and the development of family farming.”

Senator believes a revision of foreign investment rules must adequately consider the changing nature of national sovereignty, in the face of a mounting global food security task.

When the peasants of Sanamadougou and Saou began preparing their lands on 23 April 2012, they were very surprised when four of their leaders, including the village chief, were arrested and taken to the Brigade de gendarmerie in Markala.